Reborn in the USA Zuken-Redac focuses on U.S. By Richard Goering, EE Times Santa Clara, Calif. -- In an attempt to bring its worldwide leadership in pc-board CAD revenue to the U.S. market, Japan-based Zuken-Redac has moved several key strategic marketing functions to Zuken-Redac USA. One of these functions will be the release of the company's first IC router at next month's Design Automation Conference. Jack Siffermann, general manager of Zuken-Redac USA, said that operation will now handle all strategic marketing for all company products other than those that are "100 percent Zuken." Thus, for any products with Racal-Redac heritage, such as the Visula and Cadstar lines, the U.S. office will handle third-party integration and OEM agreements, acquisitions and product marketing. The U.S. office will also release the IC router, which will be based on the Racal-Redac Route Editor. This constraint-driven router will compete with IC Craftsman from Cooper and Chyan Technology Inc., which is considered so strategic that Cadence Design Systems Inc. is paying over $400 million to acquire the company. Other new products forthcoming from Zuken-Redac USA include a Windows NT version of Visula and a layout tool that can handle embedded discrete components. Although Zuken-Redac claims worldwide leadership in PC-board CAD software revenue with sales of roughly $62 million in 1996, only about $9 million of that came from North America. Still, said Sifferman, U.S. revenue is up by 34 percent over the previous year, and Zuken-Redac USA is profitable. "For the past number of years, Zuken and Redac have not been very successful within the U.S.," said Siffermann. "We made a management decision about two years ago that Zuken-Redac was going to be number one in the U.S." Cultural barriers between the United States and Japan were one issue, he said. "The company was driven by Japanese people running the U.S. operation. I think they found the culture is completely different from the Far East," said Siffermann. "We changed the management around, and we've gone from 30 to 60 people in the U.S." Zuken purchased the U.K.-based Racal-Redac in 1994, forming Zuken-Redac. While there's been some merging of technology, there are still two different product lines. Zuken's CR5000 line emphasizes analog design, and has been popular in Japan's consumer-oriented electronics industry. The Visula and Cadstar lines are aimed at digital design, with Visula focusing on high-speed boards. With its new strategic marketing charter, Zuken-Redac USA will pursue a number of third-party relationships to create a "more open" company, Sifferman said. He added that Zuken-Redac USA is looking for interface and resale agreements in such areas as product data management, analysis tools and mechanical CAD. For example, Sifferman said, Zuken-Redac USA has signed an agreement to resell the Saber analog simulator from Analogy Inc. (Beaverton, Ore.). The new U.S. thrust coincides with additions to the Zuken-Redac board of directors. Original board members included Keiich Watanabe, Zuken-Redac president and chief executive officer; Bert Montgomery, previous operations director for Northern Europe and the new corporate director of marketing and development; and Sifferman. New to the board are Manfred Asum, general manager of Zuken-Redac Germany, Yusuke Sakata, Worldwide Director of Services, U.S. CFO., and Tony Knowles, human resources manager. (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]

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