Fujitsu bets big on cloud migration services

Companies need some handholding when transitioning to a cloud environment, and Fujitsu wants to get in on the action by offering services to ease customers into the cloud.

The IT service provider has spent big on cloud, with more than half of its US$2.5 billion R&D budget going in to cloud and related technologies.

"There will be a lot of organisations that want to have a company like Fujitsu to take them to the cloud," Fujitsu corporate executive vice-president Rod Vawdrey said at the company's celebrations in Sydney for its 40th year in Australia. "We have a lot of enterprise and government customers; the journey is a critical part of taking our customers forward."

"We're investing in consulting tools, practices, capabilities, and processes to be able to take them to [a cloud] infrastructure and into a new world in terms of applications delivery."

Nearly every outsourcing and managed services job Fujitsu receives now has cloud delivery as a critical element to it, he said. This includes dealing with legacy systems and moving users to a mobile environment.

It's cost prohibitive to push everything straight into the cloud, and the advantage Fujitsu has, according to Vawdrey, is that a lot of customers that are interested in moving to the cloud already have their assets in the service provider's network of datacentres.

"Many of our customers have already begun the journey of virtualising their infrastructure, and are looking at ways to share storage and share networks," he said. "What we're doing is providing the system software, middleware, and tool sets to be able to take them to the next step to realise their applications vision within the cloud."