What is the India growth story like for Fujitsu-SAP partnership?
We have had a partnership with SAP for 40 years. The very first customer of SAP used to have a Siemens mainframe and the technology at that time came from Fujitsu. We see our role as a driver for innovations. We are delivering services out of India to the global market; however, in the last 2-3 years we have also focussed on catering to the Indian market, wherein we work with local partners. For consultancy, there is lot of traction in utilities, FMCG and manufacturing, among others.
Fujitsu is the only vendor to provide an appliance for SAP Business One, analytics powered by SAP HANA. Can you please elaborate on use-cases that you are bringing to the market?
For SAP Business One, they exclusively work only with Fujitsu. The ramp up for Business One started in March. SAP penetrates step by step in different markets and some installations are in India also. We have bundled solutions for Business One on HANA right now and this is pre-installed with SAP Business One software in our factory. We have shipped it to around 60-70 customers all around the world. It is a solution for SMB customers who want to have the analytics facility.
What sort of best practices have you charted out for HANA?
Adopting HANA is of course a paradigm shift and customers want to know what does it mean for their organisations. We work with experts from consulting side together in PoCs. We have pre-configured systems that we stage centrally in Germany.
What are the initiatives on the cloud front?
We have three partner types with SAP. We are technology partner, global hosting partner and global service partner. We offer hosting only in certain markets like Singapore, Japan and Europe. We have a platform, FlexFrame SAP, which has been established as a hosting platform over the last 10 years. Many of our customers use this as SAP out of the cloud. For example, Lufthansa in Germany leverages it with Fujitsu technology.
How does the SAP-Fujitsu partnership enable customers achieve performance with low TCO?
The main driver is from the technology side in the form of in-memory, wherein you do not store data in cache but in-memory. The technology had been available for quite a few years, but it was not affordable. It is only possible on the x86 platform. Thus, it fits perfectly with our strategy, because for many years our server strategy has been around x86. All ERP applications sooner or later will be using HANA technology. In five years, all applications will be optimised to use the benefits. Presently, not everyone needs it, but in a few years this will be a commodity. It is important for us to be early on it. We received the Technology Innovator of the Year award because we took the first step with SAP on HANA technology.
How are you helping the organisations that want to leverage SAP on virtualization?
In a data centre there are two layers of virtualization. There is hardware virtualization on a hypervisor and there is application virtualization on which we have been working together with SAP with the solution FlexFrame for many years. At that point of time, there was no Cloud or virtualization hype, but the reason was there to reduce downtime and be agile and support the user. For hardware virtualization we have also integrated VMware in our solution, but for application virtualization it’s a unique point that only Fujitsu can offer. Hardware virtualization is not application-aware, and it is very necessary to ensure optimal usage of servers.
What is your strategy on the storage front? How are you planning to leverage the DAS market that wants to use virtualization but cannot?
We have two strategies regarding storage. First, we have our own SAN based storage, Eternus. Secondly, we collaborate with NetApp on NAS-based storage. Our solutions with SAP are connected to NAS. The biggest customer worldwide is SAP itself. They have 7 PB of data. Any application on any server can be made available at any time when you have central storage. And central storage in turn must be very fast connected with the server resources and the user. Such a mechanism is a part of our FlexFrame solution. SAN or NAS will be more expensive than DAS but then, we have a lot of intelligent concepts. We have a lot of experience and good solutions there.