The end of Kaz: Fujitsu kills brand name

From Friday, Fujitsu's Kaz and Supply Chain brands would cease to exist, being relabelled as Fujitsu, the company said today.

Fujitsu Australia chief Rod Vawdrey (Credit: Fujitsu)

"The Supply Chain brand and the Kaz brand are being gracefully retired," former Kaz head and current Fujitsu executive director of sales and business development Mike Foster said.

Fujitsu CEO Rod Vawdrey said that keeping the brands would not have been viable. "Economically it's very difficult unless you're running a federation of companies to keep multiple brands in the market place," he said. "Our strategy is to create one Fujitsu."

The company had been working over the last 150 days since the Supply Chain and Kaz deals to make sure that employees understood that the corporate knowledge and values of the companies would be absorbed, not ditched, according to Vawdrey. "So now we're at the point that we've announced to our employees that as of [Friday] the visual side of Fujitsu will be Fujitsu only," he said, which would mean contracts under Fujistsu's name as well as business cards and buildings.

Supply Chain and Kaz would remain as legal entities for a number of reasons, Vawdrey said. "There will be no need for any customer to redo their paperwork as a result of this trading change," he said.

Foster said that the integration was almost finished, with the new larger company ready to take on new challenges.

Vawdrey stressed that being big, around 5000 employees now in Australia, was part of Fujitsu's strategy. He believed the market would be segmented in specialists, and broad interest companies that could use their economies of scale to make things cheaper. Fujitsu was to land in the latter category, he said.

End-user computing was to be a big focus, he continued. Recently Fujitsu won an around $200 million deal with Qantas for desktop computing. The company had to hire around 150 people to service that deal, according to Vawdrey.

Also in the desktop space, Fujitsu was ready to help companies move to Windows 7. There had been a "huge amount of interest from corporate," according to Vawdrey, but as yet companies were still testing. "I can't say that I've seen any major companies moving now," he said.

Another major focus was going to be datacentres. Vawdrey said that there was around 50,000 square metres shortfall in datacentre space across Australia. Fujitsu had positioned itself to fill the gap.

This was likely to come from government, but also from financial services, a sector which Vawdrey said had been having "discussions" with Fujitsu about infrastructure-as-a-service.