Cloud platform vendor ServiceMesh has forged a relationship with Fujitsu, giving ServiceMesh customers access to Fujitsu’s global, on-demand cloud computing footprint. ServiceMesh’s customers will now be able to build hybrid cloud instances, which can be optimized to deliver IT services at lower costs, while speeding the time to market, thanks to Fujitsu’s global cloud platform.
The relationship between ServiceMesh and Fujitsu should prove to be advantageous for the two companies.
ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform is designed to provide cloud governance, policy management, security and work-flow automation in hybrid environments spanning multiple internal and external clouds using a single management interface. In other words, the company offers a way to simplify provisioning within public and private clouds, even cloud infrastructures that span multiple service providers and international boundaries.
For Fujitsu, ServiceMesh brings an ease-of-use quality that will make it more attractive to enterprises to use Fujitsu’s cloud infrastructure. The key objective here for both companies is to entice more organizations into infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) ideologies, which are fueling the development of private, public and hybrid cloud solutions.
Fujitsu offers a global network of high-capacity, high-performance data centers, located in Japan, Australia, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Singapore.
This means that Fujitsu’s IaaS platforms have global reach, as well as scale on demand. Both of these elements are important for large corporations looking to reach multinational audiences. However, smaller companies looking to extend their customer base and reach across borders will find that Fujitsu’s global cloud platform is capable of supporting small and medium enterprises as well, and that is where ServiceMesh also comes into play.
“Enterprises need flexibility to access high-performance and cost-effective cloud-based IT resources around the world. Fujitsu’s global cloud provides the footprint for global IT resources, while ServiceMesh’s Agility Platform delivers the unified governance,” said Dave Roberts, vice president of strategy at ServiceMesh.
Cameron McNaught, senior vice president Cloud, Fujitsu Global Business Group, wrote in a statement: “We are delighted at the ServiceMesh announcement, which gives enterprise customers an easy way to build and deploy applications across our global network of cloud platforms, enabling them to meet local data residency and compliance requirements.”
McNaught hit on a critical issue: Local data residency and compliance requirements, which often dictate where companies can store their data and access it. One of Fujitsu’s strengths is its ability to offer a data center within a certain region, which may be required for compliance issues. In other words, making sure proprietary data does not traverse international borders.
That has often been a concern for financial, medical and large corporate entities looking to leverage cloud technologies. With Fujitsu providing the physical cloud infrastructure and ServiceMesh providing the governance, many compliance issues may be able to be eliminated, which should help organizations bound by legal doctrine to build hybrid clouds for applications and other services for internal and external customers.
Other cloud-enablement vendors may want to take note of what ServiceMesh is trying to achieve with its partnership with Fujitsu, especially since a cloud enablement platform that meets compliance and rapid-launch needs may be exactly what enterprises are looking for as cloud computing and IaaS come into their own.