Storage in the new Fujitsu Technology Services

Global storage competence centre

Tomorrow Fujitsu Siemens Computers will become Fujitsu Technology Services, as Fujitsu completes its buyout of Siemens' 50 per cent share of FSC. FTS becomes Fujitsu's global storage competence centre.

FTS is responsible for selling and supporting Fujitsu IT products and services in Europe, the Middle East and India, and Africa; it's Fujitsu EMEA in other words. It has around 10,000 employees, with 1,000 in research and development. One reason to have FTS as a separate entity is to let Fujitsu think global and act locally, in the words of Fujitsu president Kuniaki Nozoe.

FTS will continue to have production and R&D responsibilities, and one aim is to have a global delivery of FTS products, instead of having them penned into the EMEA geographies.

FTS becomes Fujitsu's global storage competence centre, with R&D centralised in Germany. There will be a unified set of Fujitsu storage products sold world-wide under the Eternus brand.

This brand is described as an "Aligned portfolio" and will include Eternus SAN storage arrays, Fibre Channel switches and tape libraries.

FTS will have two main storage partnerships, with EMC and NetApp. That should provide lots of scope for its marketeers to devise ways of differentiating the many overlapping products of these two suppliers and its own products.

For example, FTS supplies the CentricStor virtual tape library, whilst EMC and NetApp have their own virtual tape library products. How these three groups of products will be marketed, supported and differentiated remains to be seen.

FTS will also provide managed storage services.

FTS generally presents its products marketing-wise as parts of a dynamic infrastructure. This is a set of four approaches ranging from (infrastructure) products and services at the bottom, then infrastructure solutions, followed by managed infrastructures - a managed data centre or office - and infrastructure as a service. The storage products appear in the bottom infrastructure layer, as Eternus drives for example, and, as CentricStor, the old FSC brand, in the infrastructure solutions layer. They have a part to play in the upper two infrastructure layers but are not exposed, in the slide deck we saw, as separately branded items.

How the CentricStor brand relates to the Eternus brand is not yet known. It's possible CentricStor could be an Eternus sub-brand.

This initial FTS introduction is only a start and much more will be revealed over the next few months. ®