Fujitsu to stay on M&A trail after UShareSoft deal

Acquisition of French cloud-based software company part of Fujitsu's wider drive for more software assets

Fujitsu says it will keep on the acquisition trail after it announced a deal for French software firm UShareSoft yesterday.

Headquartered in Grenoble, UShareSoft delivers software that helps customers migrate and manage applications in the cloud.

Speaking on the opening day of the Fujitsu Forum in Munich, the company's head of EMEIA, Duncan Tait, said this acquisitive strategy is likely to continue.

"It's clear to me that we have to acquire more software assets [which are] vertically orientated in the way they deploy solutions and bring them inside Fujitsu," he said.

"The acquisition of UShareSoft that we announced today and the acquisition of ACT (Applied Card Technologies) would give you a good indication of the intellectual property and software assets we are looking to acquire and deploy into these vertical markets."

During his address, Tait also talked up the ambitions of Fujitsu's new cloud platform MetaArc, and said the deal for UShareSoft is part of this cloud push.

"This company [UShareSoft] is already part built into MetaArc," he said. "And it gives us the ability to speed up and improve the security of deploying software and solutions across multiple cloud platforms."

Following the deal – for an undisclosed amount – Fujitsu is also making UShareSoft its European R&D centre for cloud services, "accelerating the enhancement and global expansion of its cloud business", a company statement said.

Fujitsu also said it is going to integrate UShareSoft's primary software product, UForge, into the Fujitsu Cloud Service K5.

Chiseki Sagawa, senior vice president of Fujitsu, said: "The acquisition of UShareSoft will work to further strengthen K5, and the new added value it enables – namely the ease with which applications can be migrated to our cloud services and customer environments – will contribute to MetaArc.

"Moreover, we expect that co-operation between UShareSoft and Fujitsu group companies in Europe conducting business relating to software and the cloud, primarily Fujitsu Enabling Software Technology GmbH and Fujitsu RunMyProcess SAS, will raise our profile in the global cloud market."