Japanese hardware maker Fujitsu Ltd. has opened a North American subsidiary in Sunnyvale, Calif., offering server and storage products to large corporations and electronic businesses.
Fujitsu Technology Solutions Inc.’s target audience are companies that run e-business, ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management) and other crucial commercial software applications on Unix, said officials with the new company, which has a couple of hundred employees.
The company intends to use Fujitsu’s global reach, with more than 100 subsidiaries worldwide, to boost its presence in North America, offering products, including the PrimePower Unix server, which customers previously could obtain only outside of North America, said Richard McCormack, vice president of storage marketing for the new subsidiary, and Carol Stone, vice-president of server marketing.
“We get an immediate customer base,” McCormack said, noting that Fujitsu already has a strong presence in Europe and its home base of Asia/Pacific. The parent Fujitsu Ltd. is based in Tokyo. The new subsidiary will collaborate with the Tokyo-based parent Fujitsu Ltd. and with Fujitsu Siemens Computers BV in Germany.
A Web site, http://www.fujitsu.com launched about a month ago as part of the effort, Stone said.
PrimePower uses Sun Microsystems Inc. Sparc 64 processors and can scale to up to 128 processors on Sun’s Solaris operating system – a variation of Unix. The company also offers a line of entry-level servers based on Intel Corp. architecture, the GSS 4900 Modular Storage System, StorStream Media Content Server, a range of SAN (storage area network) products and networked storage software. Additionally, it provides services for server and storage customers. Pricing information for the product lines was not available.
The subsidiary further plans to offer a streaming media product for customers that need video conferencing capabilities, McCormack said. Established companies are telling Fujitsu Technology Solutions officials that they are developing their own internal streaming media while newer companies are more interested in buying such a product rather than creating something proprietary, he said.
“There’s a lot of interest (in the Fujitsu streaming media software), but there’s not a lot of the product going out the door just yet,” he said, adding that he expects that will change soon as streaming media comes more into demand.
Fujitsu Technology Solutions can be reached via the Web at http://www.fujitsu.com/.
