Major bank anchors Fujitsu’s Perth data centre

By Beverley Head
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 11:06

Strategy

One of Australia’s major banks will be the foundation client for Fujitsu’s new Perth based data centre, signalling a fresh push from the Japanese IT giant to win more financial services sector business in Australia.

Fujitsu acknowledges that it is currently underweight in terms of its penetration into the financial services sector, so securing a big bank as the anchor client for its latest data centre is something of a coup.

The Tier 3 class Perth based data centre, scheduled to open after April next year, will feature a modular design with 1,500 sq. meters available initially, with more to come as demand grows. While coy about how much it has spent on the new centre, Fujitsu ceo Rod Vawdrey said at a briefing in Sydney today that the fit-out costs for a 3,000-4,000 sq. meter data centre typically ran to $30-$50 million.

Developing a network of data centres around the country is key to the company’s strategy to host enterprise scale data centres, and also begin to roll out its own cloud based services. This will start with Fujitsu offering infrastructure as a service, followed by applications as a service, and finally business processes as a service.

The company is planning a series of announcements over the next 6-8 weeks with the first cloud based services expected to be available in May or June of next year.

Vawdrey said that in terms of supplying infrastructure as a service “we are having a lot of conversations with the banks.” Having locally based data centres was attractive to all large financial institutions which could be wary about sending data offshore.

Even so, “I’m not sure we will see core banking systems in the cloud,” quipped Vawdrey, although he is clearly keen to lure other financial services to the nascent Fujitsu cloud.

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