Business Issues and Potential Research Topics in Software Engineering from the Point of View of Japanese Software Industry

1 Japanese software industry The current circumstances surrounding the Japanese software industry are described brieey in this section. The Japanese economy is recovering slowly now, but many people are worried about weak competitive position of the software industry in the world market. 1.1 Recession Japanese industry has been struggling in a historically sever recession for many years. Number of companies and workers in software industry decreased after recording the highest marks in 199111]. The Japanese software industry depended on investment from banks and other nancial companies. But these customers reduced the expenditure for computer systems in the recession. Moreover, most of large companies have already had fundamental information systems, and manufactures have been transferring their bases to abroad to compete with foreign companies including Asian companies while the exchange rate of yen rises. 1.2 Subcontractors Similar to other industries, the Japanese software industry consists of several large companies and amount of small companies. In case of large system developments, a large company get a contract as a prime contractor, and they build the system with many subcontractors. As in other business scenes in Japan, the software companies make eeorts to keep long term relationships between companies and people with ambiguous contract statements. Engineers from subcontractors often work in the ooce of the primary contractor. And the subcontractors may send engineers from sub-subcontractors to the primary contractor as their own engineers. Primary contractors can prepare exible number of engineers for their projects by the subcontraction. 1.3 Software industry in developing countries Software companies in developing countries such as India are getting very competitive recently. Japanese companies interested in their low wage rates and high level technical skills. It is not so popular to order software developments to abroad yet, but many companies in Japan place order to foreign software companies on trial. In other hand, Asian countries including China are thought of potentially large markets for the software industry. The business in developing countries is not so prootable at present, but many companies are trying to explore the new markets in foreign countries.