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By Cara Garretson
Fujitsu America on Tuesday announced plans to introduce cloud services aimed at enterprises and independent software vendors (ISVs). The company says the offering will be a flexible collection of services that can be customized to meet subscribers’ needs.
Slated to become available in the first quarter next year, Fujitsu’s end-to-end cloud services will focus on enterprises in industries such as manufacturing, finance, healthcare and retail. In addition to putting together customized systems for clients and operating and maintaining them at Fujitsu’s data center in Sunnyvale, Calif., the company will provide vertical applications as part of the platform, according to Daniel Lawson, senior director of Fujitsu America’s solution offerings and architecture group.
Two software vendors have already signed on to provide their offerings as part of the Fujitsu platform: CoolRock Software, a maker of e-mail management software for archiving, e-discovery and collaboration; and Intershop Communications, which develops ecommerce software. At least ten more vendors are in talks with Fujitsu about adding their applications to its cloud, says the company.
Fujitsu, which began offering cloud services in Asia and Europe earlier this year, says that in the U.S. it will compete with cloud service providers including IBM and Hewlett-Packard. However, the company believes the completeness of its offering will set it apart.
“We’re focused on delivering end-to-end solutions to our customers,” said Lawson. For example, retail customers could opt to use applications from Fujitsu’s cloud services as well as its “store in a box,” a prepackaged set of components that will include point-of-sale machines, self-checkout machines, and the necessary network connectivity for one monthly fee, he explained.
To provide high availability, Fujitsu’s Sunnyvale data center will be completely mirrored with the company’s facility in Dallas, said Lawson. And to help customers comply with government and industry standards and regulations, the company will offer a PCI-compliant data center for customers that perform credit card transactions and a HIPAA-complaint facility for healthcare-related transactions.
Fujitsu expects that its customers may use services from multiple cloud computing vendors, and therefore plans to make its offerings interoperable with services from other vendors by implementing the cloud application programming interface (API) specification that it submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force’s Open Cloud Standards Incubator, said Lawson.
By implementing this API, Fujitsu will also allow its customers to bring their internally developed applications into the cloud. “We’re enabling customers with home-grown applications to link to those in the cloud,” he noted.
Pricing for the cloud services will depend on how much the customer uses, and how they would like to be charged, said Lawson. For example, customers using both equipment and services could opt to pay a monthly fee with a usage fee on top, while customers just using some services may pay a monthly fee with a lower usage fee on top, he said.
Fujitsu says its cloud services are currently being used internally to run the company’s managed security services.
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