San Diego Metropolitan - San Diego Scene

Things made and designed in San Diego: Great weather. Cellular telephones. ATMs and handheld computers. Those last two items come from Fujitsu Transaction Solutions, a division of Japan’s mammoth Fujitsu.

Based in Dallas, the division has quietly made its 170-employee West Coast headquarters in La Jolla among the biomedical institutions on North Torrey Pines Road.

“We’re about the only non-pharmaceutical company doing research there,” says Ron Omohundro, Fujitsu’s longtime executive v.p. and g.m.. “Out of San Diego, we offer all the hardware design for all our products, and marketing for our retail, financial and mobile computing business.”

Fujitsu acquired the division in 1983, bought in partnership with TRW and eventually acquired sole ownership. At the time, San Diego was the software center, with the main headquarters in Los Angeles. Fujitsu decided to consolidate the operations in Los Angeles. “That lasted 48 hours,” says Omohundro. “We reversed it because nobody was going to move from San Diego to Los Angeles.”

A Los Angeles native whose grandparents lived in Escondido, Omohundro says he understood and sympathized with the San Diego employees, and was delighted to move to San Diego, which he did about two years later.

The division’s most important products are ATMs for financial institutions and handheld computers used by companies in point-of-sale transactions. These products are invisible to most consumers, Omohundro says, although odds are they’ve come across a Fujitsu-designed ATM or shopped at a store whose suppliers use a Fujitsu handheld computer.

“These products are designed for global consumption,” Omohundro says. “Today our handhelds are being installed in the U.S., in Europe and the Far East, including Japan.”

Frito-Lay and other companies use the handhelds to record in the field how many products are delivered to outlets such as supermarkets and convenience stores. A printer in the delivery vehicle produces an invoice. “It gives them the ability to bill their customers immediately upon delivery,” Omohundro says. “They can upload all their sales for the day directly into a central database so Frito-Lay knows by 8 a.m. the next day exactly how much they sold the day before.”

The handhelds first ran on versions of Microsoft’s venerable DOS, but now more are made using Microsoft’s Windows CE operating system. Wireless systems also are being developed.

On the ATM side of the business, Fujitsu has begun to develop ATMs with built-in Web and Internet functions. Omohundro says this gives customers the convenience of doing financial transactions using the Internet’s infrastructure, which is familiar to them and also less expensive to banks than developing their own proprietary systems.

Fujitsu also has developed a first-of-its-kind ATM that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Omohundro says these ATMs are evolving into general-purpose kiosks, able to dispense movie tickets, cards, gift certificates and other items. Additionally, the company also has produced a new point-of-sale merchant terminal called TeamPoS 2000, which is essentially a specialized computer with hard drive, memory and running versions of Microsoft Windows.

“Who ever dreamed that a cash register or ATM would need a 750 megahertz Pentium processor? But that’s exactly what’s happening today,” Omohundro says.