Fujitsu To Offer 'Bring Your Own Cloud' Management Platform

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 11/07/13

During an annual customer conference, Fujitsu introduced a new set of technologies designed to enable IT organizations to implement a "bring your own cloud" strategy. The "Cloud Integration Platform" will let large school districts and other education entities work with cloud services, whether public or private, and non-cloud applications through a single portal. Integrated tools provide access control, provisioning, system monitoring, and service management.

"It is clear from regular discussions with our customers they not only want, but need, a 'single pane of glass' to integrate, aggregate and manage their growing portfolio of cloud services, regardless of whether they are deployed by an IT department, or sourced from the Cloud and procured by their Business units," explained Cameron McNaught, Fujitsu's executive vice president of Solutions. The new platform, he said, "will allow CIOs and their teams to become cloud enablers, supporting the adoption of cloud services and managing them in a simple, consistent and compliant way."

The new products will go into beta testing in December 2013 through an early-adopter program for which the company is soliciting participants. They will be available for deployment on- and off-premise and may be managed internally or be delivered as a managed service.

Fujitsu said its new offering covers these aspects:

• Provisioning to simplify and centralize provisioning of cloud resources: infrastructure, platforms, and software;
• Integration of processes, services, data, and systems, including both cloud-based and on-premise services and applications;
• Service management;
• Access control to provide unified control over who has access to IT systems; and
• Data management protection.

"The 'candy store' of irresistible cloud services continues to grow in range and complexity -- enticing customers from all corners of the enterprise to 'have cloud their way,'" said Vernon Turner, IDC's senior vice president of Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer, Network, Telecom and Sustainability Research. "IDC forecasts that public IT cloud services spending will grow at five times the rate of the IT industry as a whole, so the next big challenge for CIOs is how to simplify the way they combine and manage these services, particularly when they are delivered by multiple providers. Fujitsu's Cloud Integration Platform is leading the way to help provide organizations with the basis of seamless application, data, and management environments across their in-house ICT (information and communication technology)."