Integration aggravation to disperse in the clouds

Vendor announces new cloud platform that will get 30 or more cloud services from different vendors working together

Fujitsu has announced the launch of a cloud platform that will allow customers to integrate, manage and aggregate 30 or more different cloud services with single visibility.

Cameron McNaught, executive vice president of solutions for the international business division at Fujitsu, said the offering - dubbed the Fujitsu Cloud Integration Platform - is unique at the moment in the market, as well as going beyond what Fujitsu has attempted before.

"This is something completely new in our portfolio, and we've got a broad cloud portfolio with 3,600 customers and 18 global cloud centres around the world," he said.

As the cloud portfolio expanded, customers had begun telling Fujitsu that they really needed something beyond just cloud services - that they wanted some way of integrating, aggregating and managing the multiple cloud services coming into their organisations.

The modular platform is not a simple service catalogue or portal, but helps the various cloud services and apps aggregated together to work together efficiently, "talking to each other" instead of operating separately, McNaught confirmed.

This should improve efficiency and reduce cost, freeing up resources for that coveted innovation, McNaught noted.

Enterprise customers - although not exclusively - would be the prime targets for the new platform, with government also expected to be interested, he said.

However, SMBs and channel partners are expected to miss out - at least at first, in the case of VARs.

"We mean to sell it direct initially," confirmed McNaught. "But we do also intend to offer it through our partners."

Organisations with 2,500 staff or more would be targeted, as SMBs would not suffer from the "complexity" problems the platform is designed to reduce, he asserted.

Certain modules are being piloted now with customers, and the platform launch is expected in Fujitsu's Q4, ending 30 March 2014.

Joseph Reger, chief technology officer in the international business division at Fujitsu, said the cloud computing market has reached a point of maturity where such a platform is now needed.

"The job of integrating different cloud services - PaaS, IaaS, some kind of public cloud or virtualisation, and so on - is complicated, but not so complicated that it cannot be automated," Reger said.

In future, companies would no longer need teams of specialists to help them do these kinds of things, he said - a statement that may not be pleasant hearing for a channel increasingly reliant on the services wrap.