Fujitsu placing 'big bet' on MetaArc cloud platform

New cloud platform to help Japanese giant 'take significant market share', according to EMEIA boss Duncan Tait

Fujitsu is placing a "big bet" on its new cloud platform MetaArc and claims it will help it "take significant market share", according to the company's head of EMEIA Duncan Tait.

Speaking on the opening day of the Fujitsu Forum in Munich, Tait talked up the new cloud platform.

"For me this is a real breakthrough for our company," he said. "We are announcing this week in Europe our new global cloud platform, our new digital business platform called MetaArc. We believe there are two really strategic intents with this.

"Firstly, we expect this platform to enable us to take significant market share in private and hybrid IT, [with the] private cloud and hybrid cloud inside MetaArc. We also expect MetaArc to be the platform we develop digital solutions from. And [we] can speed up the time-to-client benefit even more."

In September the MetaArc platform was announced in Japan, but Tait said it is now going to be rolled out globally. This will come first as a private cloud and then a public cloud platform "you'll find in most of the western European economies".

When asked, Tait said it will not compete against Amazon in the cloud.

"We have to accept that almost every last one of our customers is going to be using Amazon," he said. "And a lot of them are going to be using Azure and they are going to have Google inside them; that is the nature of hybrid IT.

"We want to work with as many clients as we can; private cloud for mission-critical workloads, and then use the MetaArc platform to orchestrate these other cloud platforms that we accept our clients use. We have chosen a very defined area – private and hybrid cloud – and we are going to be the orchestrator that MetaArc enables us to be."

He added that this cloud platform is going to be integral to its customer message.

"MetaArc is our big bet in helping [customers] to manage this two-speed IT challenge they balance," he said.