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With Dell in its sights, Fujitsu could go rogue(Computer News Middle East Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) With thinly-veiled sarcasm at not wanting to be the ‘box shifter’ in the top three global IT companies, Fujitsu is deadly serious about pushing Dell from the number three slot, forklifting its business from anything remotely commoditised and instead envisioning a virtualised infrastructure future. Dave Reeder listens to the Japanese giant. If we’re honest, at times the IT industry takes itself too seriously. That’s why one of my favourite questions to any executive of the complex and far-reaching Fujitsu empire used to be to ask if they could fit the company’s global structure on a single sheet of paper, with all the different business units, trading entities and geographic companies in place. None of them ever came close. However, that complexity has helped Fujitsu creep slowly and reasonably unnoticed up the list of global players, revelling now in its non-US status to become the fourth largest IT player in the world – and the only non-American one. Now, less than a year after the transition of Fujitsu Siemens into Fujitsu Technology Solutions (FTS) and the dispersement of a number of subsidiary businesses, the word from Kai Flore, President and CEO of FTS CEMEA&I (Central Europe, Middle East, Africa and India) is “just call us Fujitsu – it’s simpler and it represents reality. We are a single global player”. And key to that transition is, according to Flore, the reality that Fujitsu “can no longer play a pure PC game”. Without mentioning Dell by name (but as the other two top three players are IBM and HP, I think we can read between the lines), he continued: “There’s a need to shift from a PC box mover to the new virtualised environment and the clients for the day after tomorrow.” This on-going refocus is part of a longterm bet-the-bank strategy from Fujistu which will see it increasingly withdraw from the commodity desktop market and build a 50:50 products and services empire at the heart of the new business and data centre imperatives – virtualisation and the cloud, though it remains unclear when or if Fujitsu will embrace the concept of the public cloud, as opposed to its current poster child, the private cloud. Reality, however, demands an admittance that this is not a strategy for instant massive revenue, although Flore admitted FTS was now cash rich and debt free – a relief after the 2008 financial results. Fujitsu believes that 2011-2 is when major new customer investments will be made in infrastructure, with 2010 as a year of preparation and pilot schemes. It intends to have the key products in place by the time of a major market upturn. And launched at the recent VISIT09 customer conference in Munich were several good proof points of its strategy. Firstly, due early 2010, is the Fujitsu Zero Client, a simple-to-manage, intelligent front-end display device that doesn’t need an OS, processor, applications or local data backup. This next-gen DVM Desktop Virtual Machines) is a major leap towards fully virtualised clients and is being positioned as the ideal access terminal for cloud or own-network hosted IT infrastructures. Immediate cost savings and reduced downtime from plug-and-use end-user access to DVMs are promised. At the other end of the food chain, the mid-range ETERNUS DX400 series disk storage system and enterprise-class ETERNUS DX8000 series provide multi-dimensional scaleability and are designed to maximise the benefits from pooling storage resources. Fujistu sees these products key building blocks for dynamic IT infrastructures in which system resources are allocated according to demand and an important milestone in consolidating its global storage portfolio under the ETERNUS brand. More interestingly, perhaps, Fujitsu also announced the first of an unspecified number of global partnerships with NetApp. Building on an existing relationship, this will see the two companies jointly develop integrated products and services in the virtualisation, storage and data management and storage solutions and services spaces. However, in other areas the companies will work with other partners and this initiative is being described as a way of delivering extra value to customers in specific storage and data management solutions. “Standardisation, virtualisation and efficiency are driving customers to rapidly change the way their data centres are designed and managed,” explains Roger Cox, Research VP at Gartner. “Increasingly, they are looking to best of breed vendors to supply the infrastructure and services for their data centres.” The concept of best of breed is, of course, central to any successful service solution business and Fujitsu, despite spending US$10m every working day on R&D will need to be a careful sailor in the shifting seas of alliances and partnerships that so differentiate the services sell from the product sell. It may be that existing internal multi-unit co-operation will give it a fast learning curve, however. One area Fujitsu is ringfencing as not of serious interest in the short- and even medium-term is the Applications-as-a-Service business, despite a toe in the water start with SAP. Although it admits this business may grow in future, at present selling tomorrow’s infrastructure to today’s customers is probably challenge enough. The delivery of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is pivotal to that challenge, underlining Fujitsu’s focus on delivering comprehensive solutions to major customers on a global scale. IaaS represents its first offering to the upper level of its Dynamic Infrastructures portfolio and with it Fujitsu completes its transformation into a global IT solutions provider with a three-layer Global IT portfolio made up of Dynamic Infrastructures, Application Services and Business Services. Available now, IaaS provides businesses of all sizes with greater cost flexibility, enabling them to unlock capital tied up in fixed assets and switch to a flexible, pay-per-use model for server processing power – with physical servers located in dedicated, purpose-built and secure Fujitsu data centres. Customers can choose an individual set up which is configured on the IaaS portal and the network connection to server resources is via a secured VPN Internet connection, instead of a network connection to a server room. These were certainly welcome messages for more than 6,000 customers who attended the Munich conference. They may not be spending heavily today but any serious corporate needs to have strategies in place to today for hot topics like utility computing, the cloud and virtualisation. According to Satoru Hayashi, Executive Vice Chairman of FTS, the key proof point for Fujitsu will be constant adjustment to the market. “Speed is the key. We need to be quick enough to adapt to change.” He speaks of a new Fujitsu which, although proudly rooted in its Japanese history, is “a new model for business, a trans-national company” as the giant corporation continues to resolve its inherited structural issues and demonstrate a global outlook. At present, however, 60% of the company’s revenues continue to come from the Japanese domestic market and that must be a key area of focus if Fujitsu intends to deliver on its expressed desire to be one of the top three global IT companies. “Innovation not acquisition is our answer,” assets Hayashi-san. “Despite our new relationship with NetApp, for example, we will not stop real investment in storage.” Meanwhile, the company has an ambitious programme ahead in the infrastructure space, planning to simultaneously deliver managed private clouds down the food chain in the SMB sector and extend its reach at the very high-end. It is, notably, the only player left committed to the Japanese fastest-computer project, aiming to deliver 10,000 trillion floating operation points per second by 2011. The current fastest supercomputer is a Cray XT5 supercomputer, running at less than a fifth that speed. A winning response to the challenges ahead for Fujitsu, I think, will depend on three key market questions: * Can Fujitsu make a successful play for any Sun shops unhappy with the Oracle deal? * Will Fujitsu’s revenues carry the company until major infrastructure spend picks up again? * As major acquisitions are ruled out, can organic growth be fast enough to overtake Dell in the ratings? Based on VISIT09, all three seem achievable, especially if it has agility, speed to market and more than a touch of going rogue. It will be interesting to watch. (c) 2008 IDG Middle East. All rights reserved. Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |