Access Co.
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ACCESS CO., LTD. (株式会社ACCESS Kabushiki-gaisha Akusesu?) (TYO: 4813), founded in April 1979 and incorporated in February 1984 in Tokyo, Japan, by Arakawa Toru and Kamada Tomihisa, is a company providing a variety of software for connected and mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, video game consoles and set top boxes.
The company has gained wide recognition for its NetFront browser product, which has been deployed in over 500 million devices, representing over 1,400 models, as of February 2008, and which has been used as a principal element of the widely successful i-mode data service of NTT DoCoMo in Japan. NetFront is also used by a large number of consumer electronic devices beyond mobile phones, such as the Sony PSP, Playstation 3 and the Amazon Kindle, both of which have their web browsers powered by NetFront. In addition, the NetFront Browser and related products are used on a wide variety of mobile phones, including those from Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, NEC, Sony-Ericsson, and others.
In September 2005, ACCESS acquired PalmSource, the owner of the Palm OS and BeOS. The company has used these assets and expertise to create the ACCESS Linux Platform, an open source-based platform for "smart phones" and other mobile devices. The company says that it expects phones based on the ACCESS Linux Platform to be released to the market in the second half of 2008. Two of the world's largest operators, NTT DoCoMo and Orange, have announced support for ACCESS Linux Platform-based handsets.
In March 2006, ACCESS acquired IP Infusion, Inc., a provider of intelligent networking software, providing Layer 2 and Layer 3 carrier-class switching and routing as well as a comprehensive forwarding plane implementation supporting L2, L3 (IPv4 & v6), multicast and MPLS/Traffic Engineering.
ACCESS is active in open source-related efforts, including memberships in the Linux Foundation, the Linux Phone Standards Forum, as well as being a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board. In 2007, ACCESS employees presented at GUADEC (which the company also sponsored) and the Ottawa Linux Symposium.
ACCESS employs approximately 1,600 people globally, in a variety of geographies, with headquarters in Tokyo, Japan and facilities in the USA (Sunnyvale, CA), France (Montpellier), Germany (Oberhausen), Korea (Seoul), the PRC (Nanjing and Beijing) and Taiwan (Taipei).
The company reports consolidated revenues of ¥26.1 billion (for the fiscal year ending January 2007).
