A: Our interaction with customers, partners and analysts so far indicate that there is room for Fujitsu in the existing market as there is a huge requirement for infrastructure in India. Behind this entire infrastructure lies IT, which acts as an enabler.  This is what differentiates India from other markets.

A: Our business strategy focuses around dynamic infrastructure. We believe customers are looking for a professional guidance to meet their business demands. India is a very good example of this kind of solution. The skill is certainly there among customers to take all the components and integrate them and create the solution for their business. So, it is not a question of skills, but it is all about speed. The rate of implementation that customers want to create and grow, leads them to miss out on time.

We have seen this in some European markets. Lack of time is something that hits IT organisations. When a business needs something, they need it as urgently as yesterday. They are not bothered about the IT plans, designs etc.

The economy over the last year and a half has been bad, and that has resulted in trimmed IT budgets. There is a strong need for IT to have standardisation, integration and look for new concepts that will allow them to be agile and quick to deploy solutions. This is where we see dynamic infrastructure meet enterprise requirements.

A: Dynamic infrastructure for us is an umbrella under which we have a large portfolio. You can look at this as a set of components that fit into a solution and a delivery model. So you have various levels of integration that happens within the dynamic infrastructure and then you have different models of delivery.

A: There are various choices. They can either own the infrastructure or lease it. They can also have the infrastructure delivered to them in models that suit their business needs in terms of user by usage or by capacity. We also have a managed services model that is based on service level agreements (SLAs).

A: In different ways. In some cases, it can be done end-to-end, while in another cases it can be done with the help of our partners. It also depends if a company only has local presence or whether it has a global reach.

The services would be based on customer needs, their location and the kind of service suites they require. Customers can look at their infrastructure as a single datacentre delivering a whole set of services and applications or they could see the infrastructure in logical groupings. Within these groupings, we could have selective outsourcing etc.

A: We have a broad view of our dynamic infrastructure offerings which is evolutionary in nature. To have a fully integrated, virtualised stack across all layers in the data centre and with the right kind of tools that ease management is a huge task. I cannot think of any provider in the market who can deliver this kind of end-to-end solution.

Our dynamic infrastructure would take the complexity out of the customer’s data centre. However, I must say that we are still in the process of developing some tools that can take this complexity out and make life simpler for enterprises.

A: If you look at the market today, there are building block providers who have platforms like storage, servers, clients etc. There are service partners providing application level services etc. We feel that there is an important layer in between where people struggle.

If you talk to CIOs today, you will find that they are not interested in building blocks anymore. What they are interested in is that their business runs on an IT platform, and they want to define a set of service levels that they expect from this platform. This is the gap. Any traditional vendor will be good in individual building blocks, but to translate that into a SLA-based platform is not easy. Typically, this job is carried out by a third-party system integrator.

The problem with such type of system integrators is that they have their own approach and one implementation might be different from the other. There is no standardisation and many customers perceive this as a risk in their IT stack.

The value that we bring to the table is the set of pre-packaged hardware and software that allows customers to translate their platform into a service level based architecture.

We have a product called as Resource Coordinator that allows enterprises to manage both physical and virtual environments. The solution allows orchestrating resources, moving applications from physical to virtual and vice versa and managing the environment through a single window. The value proposition is strong because we are hypervisor agnostic.

Resource Coordinator is a layered product that sits on top of the hypervisor.

Take the example of SAP. In the last seven to eight years, Indian enterprises have adopted the SAP ERP, but no one went for a full-blown set up of the solution. Everyone deployed it in modules. The CIOs could have chosen the same provider or a different one, but the fact is that each application module has an underlined hardware that is different from the next one. What we see is various types of SAP modules with different hardware and each one of them sub-optimally utilised. Now if you want to share information, say using a SAP NetWeaver, between these various modules there are issues.

In conjunction with SAP, we have developed a product called ‘FlexFrame’, which allows users to have a single pool of storage with high-availability built-in. This is 1: n or high availability that means that even if a customer has eight to ten servers, he would require only one or two spare servers and not 1:1. On top of this we can deploy SAP application either on a physical or virtual environment with the flexibility of moving applications from one environment to another. Customers can benefit from this as they can perform their test and development on the virtual environment and then move the tested application on the physical environment.

We deployed this solution in two large media houses - The Times of India and Hindustan Times. There has not been a single instance of unscheduled downtime in the last three years and also the cost of managing the environment has reduced.

Any change in the SAP environment is a cause of worry for many companies. For example, if you want to put a new upgrade or a new patch, there could be chances of the application becoming unstable.

So what we are doing here is providing one single image of the operating system across all the servers, and you have one copy of the application that is common across the servers.

rahul.mani@9dot9.in