Major bank anchors Fujitsu's Perth data centre

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 11:06

IT Industry - Strategy

With around 5,000 staff and revenues of about $1.2 billion in Australia and New Zealand Vawdrey believes that Fujitsu now has the scale and heft preferred by enterprise clients looking for suppliers of Tier 3 class data centres.

The development of a network of Australian data centres was “the cornerstone of other initiatives.” Beside the planned Perth data centre the company has one in Melbourne with three universities as anchor clients, and a data centre at Homebush in Sydney’s west which is almost at capacity, with further investment planned.

Vawdrey quoted analysis which suggested there was demand for another 50,000 sq. meters of Tier 3 class data centre capacity in Australia at present.

Such is the rate at which Fujitsu is rolling out data centres that it is edging closer to joining the 600 odd Australian organisations which are now obliged to report under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System, Vawdrey acknowledged. He said that the company was investing in the sustainability area and designing its data centres to keep a lid on emissions.

While initially Fujitsu’s data centres will be used to run clients’ computing infrastructures, they will over time be used increasingly to underpin Fujitsu’s cloud computing offerings. Vawdrey said that over his three year planning cycle the company hoped to have about 30 per cent of the data centres’ capacity used to deliver Fujitsu cloud services.

The company plans to initially leverage demand for its cloud services off existing customers looking to move more computing to the cloud, but would also be seeking out new clients for the service.

Vawdrey also announced that Fujitsu had completed the integration of the two businesses it acquired earlier this year – namely the KAZ Group which it bought after protracted negotiations with Telstra, and Supply Chain Consulting. From Friday both those brands will cease to exist and become Fujitsu branded services.