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Not caught by surprise: Fujitsu

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CIOL Bureau
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PUNE, INDIA: Toasted or Toast? Bread and butter can not be a taken-for-granted breakfast in today’s fast-paced, rapidly-morphing, fluid world. Fujitsu Limited that reported consolidated revenues of $55 billion (for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2011), has set special anchors in India, through its subsidiary Fujitsu Consulting India Pvt. Ltd., that operates what Fujitsu calls, its largest Global Delivery Center in the world. At the helm of this GDC which is chugging forth at a clip of 32 per cent annually over the last five years, is Sunil Bhave, Vice President, Application Services, Fujitsu Consulting India (consulting arm of Fujitsu).

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Here, he takes us on a quick tour around various recent contours created for the company in the industry landscape. He tells us why or why not strategies are being tweaked for IaaS, full-stack offerings, in-memory waves, cloud’s impact areas and more. Would the bread-and-butter winner hardware portfolio turn into bread-and-jam as the tables turn? Knives anyone?

Why is the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) market interesting to pursue? Specially when players like Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid etc are already drilling it?

The way we approach different markets is different. Globally, there are 13 development centres for IaaS. In India, we don’t have our own data centres. We are different though because the client gets a single-window provider along with the edge of a global presence. We are in competition with global players and not just any other IaaS provider.

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Storage lineage is a great backdrop but things have changed a lot. Storage prices have nosedived and at the same time Analytics has shot upwards. How does this new equation affect your company, and herald the new gamut of cloud services or Big Data Suites from Fujitsu?

We are investing a lot in both Big Data and Analytics. We have joined hands with SAP on many fronts, and co-located at many of their premises for co-development work. India is in early stages of adoption. But the whole trend towards mobile computing is attractive. New areas of CRM systems will happen and the way organizations want to leverage social platforms is exciting as well.

That means exciting changes in your portfolio?

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Application services, RIM (Remote Infrastructure Management), IT-oriented business consulting are key areas for us. Talking of India, we want to focus on industry-domain solutions, applications and hardware as well as on complete solutions. The traditional model of analytics which was heavy, potential-requirement-based, parameter-driven is giving way to new-powered, integrated, software-and-hardware blended solutions. Integration with devices is also a new thing and will be driven a lot by customers.

Can we then see Fujitsu surfing the full-stack wave?

Well, we work closely with many vendors. In most cases, we complement each other. The way this will play out in future for the likes of us is through more collaboration opportunities. We are working closely with many of them through their development cycles.

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How do we translate announcements like VMWare private cloud, specially in understanding the question of possible dent on your hardware markets?

In India, storage is a great legacy. When you think cloud here, you also have to think that there are two aspects to establishing cloud here- the technology part and the legal aspect. That is very nascent. Nevertheless, we have developed specific areas of cloud solution and will actively pursue them. As to the hardware pieces, in many cases, it would be a complementary force. Yes, it will change some dynamics as cloud becomes popular. Let’s see.

So even in-memory computing advances would not adversely affect traditional hardware segments?

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In-memory is something where we have not really been caught by surprise. It is about solutions that cover both applications and hardware. Hardware capacity is now graduated to a much higher level now. So now some technology components will be new. Still, a large segment will continue to meet the solutions. It would be a parallel segment, HANA market is yet to mature.

Fujitsu has recently done something interesting in Japan with the Akisai Agricultural Cloud cluster. Can something similar be replicated for another agrarian economy- India?

Yes. The cutting-edge deployment in Japan and the slew of eco-friendly solutions have a lot of potential. Last six to eight months have been spent considering the possibility of a similar application in India. Right now, it would be too early to say, but specific pockets are indeed being seriously evaluated.

Any turns on Lustre File system for HPC, specially after the question mark on its fate due to Oracle’s acquisition via Sun Microsystems?

Whether it will stay or go is something to be watched, if that’s what you mean. It’s hard to predict one way or another. We will have to wait for that one.