Fujitsu has begun the roll out of a "global Cloud platform" in a bid to tap into the emerging Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market.
The service enters a pilot stage in Japan next month before a commercial offering is made available in October. Australia will be the next country to roll out the Cloud compute service, followed by Singapore, the US, the UK and Germany.
"Fujitsu has been developing its Cloud computing technologies by looking at changes in society and how technology can help people cope with those changes - what we call a human-centric standpoint," said Kazuo Ishida, corporate senior executive vice president, responsible for ICT Services Business. "In Japan, we have been successful in conducting trials involving ICT infrastructures in areas such as agriculture and healthcare. Through these offerings, we aim to become a leader in providing these types of services around the world."
Fujitsu sees this global roll out as a first step in an evolving wider strategy. "We will deliver a standardized Cloud service through the deployment of our global Cloud platform," commented Fujitsu senior executive vice president Richard Christou. "To address the other modes of our consumption model, we will be making further announcements, including in conjunction with our key partners, in the coming months. Fujitsu is now in a position to work with customers to deliver the benefits of Cloud."
But pitching a global strategy is one thing; cracking the US market is quite another, warned Ian Brown of analyst firm Ovum. “While its robust infrastructure services are finding favour in the UK, Germany, and Australia, Fujitsu's primary challenge remains how to gain more credibility as a global IT service player with US enterprises,” he said.
“Fujitsu sees its role in the IT environment as not only helping to deliver robust, industrial-strength Cloud services and transition legacy services to them, but also integrating a complex hybrid of composite services, Clouds, and legacy environments. As Fujitsu says, it will be very messy - but then, outsourcers know a lot about mess.
“Ultimately, Fujitsu's vision for Cloud services is that new markets will emerge on the back of the Cloud as a result of relationships developed through its Activity and Content Cloud offerings. It ties this in with its vision for the networked society, in which Clouds provide the horsepower to monitor and manage energy, utilities, transport, health, and a raft of other smart services. However, this is the least convincing part of the strategy because it's not clear that Clouds are a necessary condition for supporting such workloads.
“Before we get to that utopian vision, there are rather mundane issues for Fujitsu the global IT services vendor. It may be the fourth-largest IT vendor in the world, but it doesn't look like that from the US, and we're not convinced that it has the scale in the US to conclude the partnerships it needs to create new Cloud-based Activity and Content services in the world's largest IT market. We also think Fujitsu's historical propensity to centrally control and engineer “bet-the-business” strategies such as Cloud to the nth degree tends to make it look wooden and less agile than its competitors.”
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