Storage in the new Fujitsu Technology Services
Global storage competence centre
Tomorrow Fujitsu Siemens Computers will become Fujitsu Technology Services, as Fujitsu completes its buyout of Siemens' 50 per cent share of FSC. FTS becomes Fujitsu's global storage competence centre.
FTS is responsible for selling and supporting Fujitsu IT products and services in Europe, the Middle East and India, and Africa; it's Fujitsu EMEA in other words. It has around 10,000 employees, with 1,000 in research and development. One reason to have FTS as a separate entity is to let Fujitsu think global and act locally, in the words of Fujitsu president Kuniaki Nozoe.
FTS will continue to have production and R&D responsibilities, and one aim is to have a global delivery of FTS products, instead of having them penned into the EMEA geographies.
FTS becomes Fujitsu's global storage competence centre, with R&D centralised in Germany. There will be a unified set of Fujitsu storage products sold world-wide under the Eternus brand.
This brand is described as an "Aligned portfolio" and will include Eternus SAN storage arrays, Fibre Channel switches and tape libraries.
FTS will have two main storage partnerships, with EMC and NetApp. That should provide lots of scope for its marketeers to devise ways of differentiating the many overlapping products of these two suppliers and its own products.
For example, FTS supplies the CentricStor virtual tape library, whilst EMC and NetApp have their own virtual tape library products. How these three groups of products will be marketed, supported and differentiated remains to be seen.
FTS will also provide managed storage services.
FTS generally presents its products marketing-wise as parts of a dynamic infrastructure. This is a set of four approaches ranging from (infrastructure) products and services at the bottom, then infrastructure solutions, followed by managed infrastructures - a managed data centre or office - and infrastructure as a service. The storage products appear in the bottom infrastructure layer, as Eternus drives for example, and, as CentricStor, the old FSC brand, in the infrastructure solutions layer. They have a part to play in the upper two infrastructure layers but are not exposed, in the slide deck we saw, as separately branded items.
How the CentricStor brand relates to the Eternus brand is not yet known. It's possible CentricStor could be an Eternus sub-brand.
This initial FTS introduction is only a start and much more will be revealed over the next few months. ®
COMMENTS
Tolyo Freeze Out
Now I thought it was Fujitsu Services who set a pay freeze and this article is all about Fujitsu Siemens Computers becoming Fujitsu Technology Solutions. Of course, we all know that the only thing common to those three entities is the name Fujitsu and some corporate management-sans in Tokyo, yes?
Fujitsu Sun tie up
If Sun goes to IBM or another then this may weaken both Fuji's server and storage market
Long Live Fujitsu Siemens !
Great update. Now we know what to call the new things Thanks Chris.
Process heavy Siemens acted as a terrific counterbalance to process light Fujitsu in the early days of FSC and its a bit sad to see the passing of the partnership joint venture. Long Live FSC!
There has been terrifically incompetent top leadership within FSC from the start but i am hopeful with Kai Flore and with the newly named arrangement.
Siemens provided and provides absolutely superb site technical support across many countries for FSC especially to meet the heavy demands of top tier Enterprise Customers and others before FSC brought in Siemens ITS.
Now Fujitsu are going it alone . . . and they have never really mastered global reach.
Fujitsu face multitudinous problems across the whole business and only time will tell how successful their current strategies and actions will be.
They are often not moving fast nor proactively enough in my view.
Hiving off disk drives to Toshiba shows the weakness in storage technology.
Storage has never been an FSC and now FTS strength.
Hence EMC and NetApp as partners.
Scale does not always confer quality and although FTS and storage solution center are big there are problems running global technology from Europe rather than the US or Asia Pacific.
Good news for existing FSC customers though it may be supposed.
Eternus product for the GS21 Fuji Mainframe is Fuji's own but is nothing compared with market leading EMC DX and Hitachi's USP V and possibly even IBM DS.
Now they are using Eternus as an extend and embrace brand.
In an already highly competitive and consolidating storage supply base.
Regards
Ray
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