Fujitsu aims for higher North American profile, profits

Fujitsu, the third largest IT infrastructure service provider in the world, is unveiling this week a slew of IT partnerships and products that company executives expect will raise the company's profile and profits in North America.

The CEO of Fujitsu Computer Systems, Toshio Morohoshi, said the company, which has $50 billion in revenue worldwide, will go from $3.5 billion in North American revenues to $10 billion by the end of the decade.

To kick off that initiative, the company unveiled six new products and two new partnerships and discussed Resource Coordinator, a system management technology formerly only available in Japan that will become available in North America this year.

Resource Coordinator, part of a suite of infrastructure management products marketed under the rubric Systemwalker, is a now a pilot in North America.

The Coordinator module has a view of all hardware resources including switches, storage, servers, and networks. It will enable an IT manager to define any group of hardware across that view as an enterprise service group, according to Keith Swenson, vice president of Research & Development at Fujitsu.

"For example everything around CRM becomes a service group," Swenson said.

Resource Coordinator monitors service groups and its components and can add or subtract hardware based on business rules without user intervention.

"If a service group has too many jobs going through the system, it could make more CPUs available in response to a specific SLA," Swenson said.

Resource Coordinator and many of the other products and partnerships announced this week are designed in relation to what Jean Bozman, director at IDC called the trend toward "dynamic IT," which seeks to combine business imperatives, business processes, and IT infrastructure.

"IT needs to be more flexible and it needs to be able to change with changing business strategies," Bozman said.

In addition to the upcoming launch of Resource Center, Fujitsu unveiled an agreement among itself, BMC Software, HP and IBM to create a interoperability specification and standard for CMDB (Configuration Management Database) that will give users federated access to information in a multivendor IT environment.

Also announced were two partnerships, one with Deloitte Consulting for collaboration on compliance and controls monitoring, and another partnership with Affiliated Computer Services (ACS). ACS will market a new service called FlexFrame for mySAP Business Suite.

The SAP-hosted solution will give ACS a more flexible SAP environment that can respond faster to its customers' changing demands, said David Budnick, director of Field Operations at ACS.

Using Fujitsu's Systemwalker technologies as well as its FlexFrame architecture, Budnick said ACS will be able to create for its customers a "virtualized solution" for hosting SAP applications.

Also introduced this week was a migration tool to move batch jobs and especially sorts from a mainframe to a Windows environment.

What used to be as much as a 10-hour to 12-hour batch and sort job on a mainframe can be reduced to one or two hours, and a two hour job to 20 minutes, according to Ron Langer, vice president of Global Cobol Sales.

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