FileMaker hopes launch will propel Asia strategy
Small business database firm FileMaker is pulling out all the stops to gain market share in Asia. With the launch of FileMaker Pro 7 last month and the server version last week, the company believes it can gain momentum and market share in Asia.
Steve McManus, FileMaker's Asia Pacific general manager, said the biggest competition was not from Microsoft's Access database but from a different Microsoft product: Excel.
'I don't really believe Access is our main competition,' he said. 'Access is not as easy to use as Word, PowerPoint or Excel. We all use a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation application. We are familiar with how to use them. FileMaker makes managing a database just as easy.'
Mr McManus admitted it was difficult to challenge a product bundled with Microsoft Office, but he believed FileMaker could still gain market share.
'We are particularly good at appealing to our target audience: the knowledge worker,' he said. 'This is someone who knows his subject, is computer literate, can find his way around an operating system, and knows how to use a wordprocessor and spreadsheet. The knowledge worker has specific issues and requires software that is malleable.'
More than nine million copies of FileMaker Pro have been shipped. It is used in large companies and organisations normally associated with the likes of Oracle, Sybase or IBM's DB2. Nasa tests rocket engine designs with FileMaker Pro, and it is in 70 of the Fortune 100 companies.
The latest version takes larger files and can handle huge amounts of data. Mark Banks, FileMaker's systems engineer for Asia Pacific, said it was capable of handling amounts of data that few people would ever see.
'If everybody in Hong Kong produced a record every second, it would take 200 years to fill the database,' he said.
Nevertheless, FileMaker had no intention of challenging the likes of Oracle.
'We are not in the enterprise space,' Mr McManus said.
Perhaps more important is the prospect of a Chinese-language version later this year.
In the past, FileMaker has had some issues with Chinese-language support, but FileMaker Pro 7 includes support for Unicode.
The official position is that the product does not support Chinese, but this has not stopped some users from trying, even though things such as sorting are not yet possible.
