PARC And Fujitsu Disclose Broad Research DealPARC And Fujitsu Disclose Broad Research Deal

Palo Alto Research Center Inc., the technology lab spun off from Xerox Corp., and Japanese IT company Fujitsu Ltd. revealed Tuesday a joint research agreement under which PARC will license software, patents, and prototype technology to Fujitsu for use in future products.

Fujitsu, which had revenue of $45 billion last year, disclosed the agreement in a press release, though PARC center director Mark Bernstein said the companies have been formally working together since September. Bernstein declined to discuss the value of the contract or the number of staff involved.

Researchers and engineers from PARC and Fujitsu have been working together in Palo Alto, Calif., and Japan for the past several months to apply PARC technologies to Fujitsu's intellectual property to create products in an area they call "ubiquitous computing." That includes markets for health-care IT systems, disaster-response networks, customer-relationship-management software, and work on roads equipped with sensor networks and other instrumentation to regulate traffic flow. Wireless technologies will be important components of the research and development.

Fujitsu plans to bring its first products based on the work to market in 2006, and the three-year deal also grants PARC access to the resulting inventions, Bernstein says. PARC plans to market those technologies to other companies that don't compete with Fujitsu, the leader in computers and IT services in Japan.

PARC, formed by Xerox in 1970 to investigate the office of the future, incorporated as an independent company in January 2002 and draws about two-thirds of its $55 million annual research budget from contracts with Xerox. The rest comes from contracts with other companies and government agencies.

As part of Xerox in the 1970s, PARC was home to inventions such as the personal computer with a graphical user interface, the laser printer, Ethernet networking, and the WYSIWYG word processor. But Xerox never commercialized those inventions as successfully as other companies.

Bernstein says important aspects of the Fujitsu deal include the nonexclusive status of inventions that result from the companies' work, use of open standards, and PARC's ability to use the new intellectual property "in its own fashion." Says Bernstein, "What we're trying to avoid is coming out yet again with a set of proprietary standards that limit the growth and opportunity."