Fujitsu is the latest tech vendor to pledge billions of dollars to expand its cloud computing capabilities.
Company officials announced July 14 that Fujitsu, which in 2011 extended its cloud solution beyond Japan and last year launched its Cloud Initiative, will spend $2 billion over the next two years to grow its abilities in such areas as platform-as-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud integration. The company also will focus on such areas as business and social innovation, and improving how it delivers those capabilities, officials said.
They also hope to reach $3.5 billion in cloud revenues.
Fujitsu’s financial commitment to its cloud strategy comes as enterprises embrace new workloads that call for a broad approach by vendors that not only includes technology, but also a range of partnerships, according to Cameron McNaught, executive vice president of solutions and global delivery.
“We see cloud as the natural platform for delivering these new types of applications, which is reflected in both the increase we are seeing in cloud adoption and how it is becoming a standard part of IT service delivery models for many CIOs today,” McNaught said in a statement. “We also recognize that no single cloud service provider can meet all customer needs, so we are continuing to invest in our cloud integration services.”
Fujitsu is not the only top-tier tech vendor to promise to spend billions of dollars to build up their cloud computing portfolios. Cisco Systems officials in March announced that the networking giant will spend $1 billion over two years expanding its lineup of partners to build out its vision of a series of interconnected clouds through which Cisco will be able to deliver applications and services. Cisco sees its OpenStack-based Intercloud initiative—which officials envision as a connected family of distributed cloud environments, as opposed to just being a Cisco-based solution—as an avenue for competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services and the foundation for the growing Internet of things.
“We saw an opportunity to help customers simplify the creation of hybrid cloud environments,” Rob Lloyd, president of development and sales at Cisco, said in a post on the company blog at the time. “We saw an opportunity to expand the portfolio of cloud services we deliver. We also saw an opportunity to share risk with our customers, resellers and service provider partners by building a global Intercloud—a network of clouds—that could be leveraged to help partners and service providers bring new services to market more quickly.”
In May, Hewlett-Packard announced its own $1 billion, two-year investment in its OpenStack cloud platform, which company officials said is called Helion. The platform includes a full OpenStack distribution and will be complemented by the Helion Developer Platform PaaS solution.
“Helion is an umbrella brand across all of our cloud portfolio,” Kerry Bailey, senior vice president of sales at HP, told eWEEK.
In their announcement, Fujitsu officials noted numbers from market research firm Frost and Sullivan indicating the cloud computing market will grow from about $36 billion in 2013 to $86 billion in 2016.
Fujitsu already offers a range of solutions in its cloud portfolio, including private (with two new Fujitsu data centers planned for this year) and public IaaS hosting (and another two more data centers for 2014), and a PaaS solution based on the RunMyProcess acquisition from last year that enables users to create new connected systems that can run across on-premises, cloud and mobile environments, officials said.
Fujitsu also offers services around cloud IT management and cloud backup-as-a-service, as well as new cloud infrastructure offerings this year for solutions that leverage Fujitsu, VMware and OpenStack software. The company also this year will expand its cloud managed hosting solution, officials said.
