Fujitsu in the land of the giants
Summary
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It should be obvious that the big three in the server wars are Sun, IBM, and Hewlett Packard. According to the numbers provided by a March 2001 IDC survey, they hold 35, 23, and 19 percent of the market, respectively. Compaq trails the pack at 8 percent, so even a merger with HP wouldn't necessarily catapult the doubtful duo into first place. "Other" constitutes 11 percent of the market. But if you look very carefully at the stats you'll notice a little slice of the pie labeled "Fujitsu." It occupies a mere 4 percent of the total, nearly two-thirds less than every other server manufacturer combined. Who is Fujitsu, this little David that has decided to throw itself against a veritable wall of Goliaths?
The first thing to understand is that Fujitsu is only disguised as a meek, mild-mannered shepherd boy. Although we could probably tweak the date for the foundation of the IBM empire to make it look earlier, CTR officially changed its name to International Business Machines in 1924. It was just 11 years later that Fujitsu Ltd. was born from the communications division of Fuji Electric Co., Ltd. in 1935. Still, 66 years later it's captured only 4 percent of the market?
Again, you need to move aside the disguise and look at the facts. Fujitsu Ltd. has been quite active in the east and in Europe with the development and manufacture of phones, communications equipment, and computers. It's been partnered with Siemens, Hitachi, Amdahl (which it now owns), AMD, and others worldwide . As of March 2001, Fujitsu Ltd. has an employment roster totaling 187,000 people and about $8.7 billion USD in sales for that same fiscal year. But it wasn't until 1985 that Fujitsu Microsystems of America, Inc. (FMA) came into existence, and it was only in November 2000 that Fujitsu Technology Solutions opened its doors in Sunnyvale, California. Arguably, FTS has earned itself a 4 percent market share in about a year.
On the surface, that seems like an amazing--if not impossible--feat. How Fujitsu Technology Solutions did it is fairly simple: It took the best of what it knew was already available and then made it better according to its own modeling plan. In fact, almost 9 percent of Fujitsu Ltd.'s revenues are pumped back into R&D. The result is its PrimePower line of systems development and manufacture, which range from single processor nodes to 128-CPU enterprise monsters.
Not just a pretty box, its PrimePower 2000--loaded with 128 SPARC64-GP processors designed by Fujitsu and powered by Solaris 8--took top honors in a recent TPC-C benchmark test by performing 455,818.20 transactions per second. On a cost analysis basis, that equates to about $28.58 per transaction--which Fujitsu claims is lower than anything offered by the competition. Also aimed at keeping TCO down, the PrimePower systems support multiple generations of processors in the same system and, of course, dynamic partitioning is available to create virtual systems with faster CPUs dedicated to more time critical applications
As the dust clears, it's somewhat evident that Fujitsu Technology Solutions isn't a little David squaring off against Goliaths. It's another Goliath that just looks less in stature as it begins to appear on the distant horizon. It's adopted the successful SPARC/Solaris paradigm and while the existing giants are squabbling among themselves, FTS is acquiring a customer base. Worse still for the competition (and possibly better for IT professionals), FTS is hungry for more market share. It's definitely a company to watch, and certainly one to talk to.
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