Fujitsu

The world's third-largest IT services provider, Fujitsu was established in June 1935 as a subsidiary of Fuji Electric.

Then called Fuji Tsushinki Manufacturing, the company was capitalized at 3 million yen (US$25,800) and had 700 employees. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, it opened its first international office in New York in March 1967. Thirty years later in March 1997, it established Fujitsu Asia in Singapore to boost the company's solutions business in the region.

Today, Fujitsu is a US$44.5 billion organization and employs 151,000 people worldwide. Its extensive range of products and services include systems integration, personal computers, servers, storage, database and systems management software, semiconductors, plasma screens and even air conditioners.

The company's commitment to research and development (R&D) is clearly marked by its longstanding mission which states: "What mankind can dream, technology can achieve." It aims to fulfill this vision through the Fujitsu Laboratories, hiring 11,000 research engineers worldwide, and 1,500 research scientists who are based in labs located in Japan, China, the United Kingdom and United States.

With 32,000 patents to its name, Fujitsu's R&D activities cover a variety of technologies aimed toward making ubiquitous networking a reality. These include grid computing, RFID (radio frequency identification), fuel cells, bioinformatics and nanotechnology.

Just last month, the company unveiled plans to release a four-core Sparc chip in 2008, which will boast clock speeds of at least 2.7GHz. The Sparc64 VI+ processor will be built on Fujitsu's manufacturing process, which allows for features as small as 65 nanometers.

Fujitsu also demonstrated its commitment to Asia earlier this year when it opened a S$3.5 million (US$2.1 million) testing facility in Singapore, to allow customers from the region to test and evaluate the company's products.