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Fujitsu officials continue to invest in cloud computing and the Internet of things, announcing the company’s plans to expand its two main data centers in Japan.
The company said the expansion of the Tatebayashi System Center and Akashi System Center will help accelerate the development of Fujitsu’s cloud services, outsourcing and Internet of things (IoT) businesses. The data center annexes are scheduled to open next year.
Fujitsu officials said customers are demanding greater IT flexibility, diversified applications and business continuity capabilities, particularly after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of the island nation’s eastern region.
“In recent years, companies have been facing significant management challenges, such as the need to enhance business continuity measures for disaster mitigation and recovery, rationalizing ever-increasing operational costs, and the ability to respond immediately to changes in the market, all of which have increased the importance of ICT [information and communications technology] more than ever as essential infrastructure for management,” company officials said in a statement.
Fujitsu has been actively building out its cloud services capabilities. The company extended its cloud solutions beyond Japan in 2011, and in July 2014 it announced plans to spend $2 billion between last year and 2017 to grow its abilities in such areas as platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud integration. Fujitsu also will focus on such areas as business and social innovation, and improving how it delivers those capabilities.
The company hopes to see cloud revenues grow to $3.5 billion.
In November 2013, Fujitsu introduced its Human-Centric IoT platform, which will give customers and partners access to an array of the vendor’s technologies—including hardware, software, middleware, networks and sensors—to use as a test bed for their proposed products. Other vendors also will be able to leverage the platform to test and verify their products.
Fujitsu officials said the company will leverage the latest IT technologies in the expanded data centers, including software-defined networking (SDN).