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5,000 job cuts later: Fujitsu boss says bloodletting's almost over ... for now

Now, go sell these lovely cloud and backup services

Fujitsu Forum Fujitsu’s international boss said the company was substantially through a painful transformation that saw it shed 5,000 staff, as the firm kicked off its customer shindig in Munich with a raft of storage and cloud announcements.

Now all the remaining staff have to do to keep their jobs is get stuck into pushing the cloud and the vendor’s storage and server products.

Rod Vawdrey corporate veep and president of Fujitsu’s international business took over the helm of the Japanese giant’s EMEA business a year ago, after predecessor Rolf Schwirz’s shock departure from the company around the time of last year’s customer get-together. Vawdrey’s mission was to force the pace of integration of the firm's European wing, pulling it into line with the international Fujitsu operation. This was followed by project Jupiter, effectively a redundancy programme which saw it shed 5,000 jobs across its global operations - but not in the UK.

Today Vawdrey said that that programme was substantially over, and that a spotty economic revival across Europe meant that overall Fujitsu had had a “very good first half”.

Presumably, he expects the transformed team to jump at the range of products and services unveiled at the conference.

These included the upgraded range of Eternus DX storage kit unveiled today. In parallel with the DX arrays, Fujitsu took the wraps of the Eternus CS8000 backup and archiving line, which it claimed would be able to handle up to 15PB of data before users need to think about deduping or compression.

Hans-Dieter Wysuwa, vice president of product systems technology and channel, said backup and archiving were often under-resourced in most organisations, meaning they often “misused” backup systems instead.

Fujitsu also announced the pilot of its Cloud Integration Platform, which it claimed will deliver a “single pane of glass” spanning an organisation’s cloud services as well as conventional technology services.

Customers will be able to choose which cloud services they want the system to manage, said exec veep for solutions Cameron McNaught, and it would be able to access any cloud service that published its APIs. There would be closer integration with certain Fujitsu partners, he said, for example VMWare.

The platform will span provisioning, integration, service management, access control and data management. Or at least it will when it’s ready for primetime - which should be by the end of Q1 next year. Some elements, such as data management and service management, are already available.

The initial targets will be enterprise CIOs and government, said McNaught, though the service could in time filter down to smaller organisations, perhaps through partners.

He added that apart from giving CIOs control over their cloud and traditional tech and ensuring they had full backups of whatever they were putting into the cloud, it would help them rein in shadow IT systems built up by rogue departments with access to a credit card. ®

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