Europe - One Market, Many Faces

In the EMEA marketplace (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Lutris has been active for over a year, establishing its business and building on the large existing interest in Enhydra and other related open-source technologies.

As those in Europe know, the efforts to integrate the countries of Europe into a single market has been partially successful, but differences in language, culture, market profile and economic conditions require a different approach to the market than one might take in the more homogenous USA.

As a result, the Lutris EMEA team, a talented team of product engineers in Watford, and myself as sales lead, has been actively building up a base of specialist partners in the key European markets, in order to take on the sales, support and education activity related to the launch of the Lutris EAS product.

To date, partners in UK, France and Germany, are fully active, with Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Netherlands soon to have experienced EAS teams to support the growing interest from end-users and developers in the innovative services architecture of EAS.

Paremus, a new consulting company based in the City of London, is a group of experienced technology experts and consultants from within the financial community, who came together last year to bring the benefits of new middleware architectures to the leading financial players in the City. They have selected Lutris EAS as one of their key technologies to support, due to its support for J2EE standards and its flexible services architecture. Paremus believe that the 'Intel Price-point' of Lutris EAS is also going to be instrumental in providing massive cost benefits to the Java community in the City, who wish to continue innovating in a time of reduced capital expenditure.

In Frankfurt, Germany, Lutris has partnered with Teksolv, a company with years of Java and e-business experience, again with particular focus in the financial sector. Teksolv have been re-architecting the financial information portal they developed to benefit from the services approach of Lutris EAS. Lutris and Teksolv will be demonstrating Lutris EAS and this solution at the upcoming CeBit show in Hannover in March. You will find us in Hall 6, Stand F52/493, Internet Park, March 13-20.

Our most recent partner addition, has been Lynx in France. Lynx are an established company in the database sector having been the largest reseller for the Centura product line in France, and more recently have developed a toolset for the development and deployment of business object models and EJB's. By partnering with Lutris, Lynx now have a full product suite to offer their clients who are migrating their business applications to the J2EE programming model.

Success for Lutris in EMEA will be based on the success of each of our partners we work with. Like the sailing metaphor - ' All ships rise with the tide' - I look forward to seeing our mutual success be the basis for the European acceptance of the next generation of application servers based around a flexible services architecture.