Japanese IT major Fujitsu has tied-up with Microsoft for offering cloud computing services to its customers. With the combined effect of the economic slowdown and advent of increased Internet speeds, the low cost cloud computing concept has gained immense popularity, helping clients cut costs with the installation of less powerful machines with less memory.

The tie-up details the deployment of the Windows Azure platform in Fujitsu Data Centres, starting initially with Fujitsu's Tatebayashi centre in late 2010, ultimately leading to implementation across other global locations.

Fujitsu has targeted a revenue yield of 1.5 trillion yen (USD 17 billion) from global cloud computing operations by 2016, marking it as a mainstay in its growth strategy. Fujitsu also aims at expanding its cloud computing operations to five global locations by March 2011, namely:  Australia, Britain, Germany, Singapore and the United States.

Having recently established a data centre in China, due to begin operations next year, Fujitsu expects to double its last year’s revenue from cloud computing to 45 billion yen.