Fujitsu has a vision of a prosperous, human-centric, intelligent, networked society, and this strategic global partnership with Microsoft is a major step forward in being able to realize this,” said Kazuo Ishida, corporate senior executive vice president, responsible for ICT Services Business, Fujitsu. “Through this alliance, we are providing our customers with a new array of possibilities in cloud computing. Our partnership with Microsoft truly reflects Fujitsu’s cloud strategy and will no doubt break new ground in contributing to the creation of an IT-networked society.”
Microsoft also announced today at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Washington, D.C., the limited production release of the Windows Azure platform appliance, a turnkey cloud platform for large service providers and enterprises to run their own datacenters. Customers and initial partners such as Fujitsu using the appliance in their datacenters will have the scale out application platform and datacenter efficiency of Windows Azure and SQL Azure offered by Microsoft today.
“We believe the introduction of the Windows Azure platform appliance marks an important industry milestone in the transformation to cloud computing,” said Bob Muglia, president of Server and Tools Business at Microsoft. “By extending the power of our cloud platform to customer and service provider datacenters like Fujitsu, we are paving the way for more customers to fully realize the business benefits of the cloud.”
In addition to deploying the Windows Azure platform appliance in Fujitsu’s datacenters, the partnership also involves both companies, combining their strengths to develop a Fujitsu branded Windows Azure platform appliance, that customers will be able to purchase and deploy in their own datacenters, using Fujitsu’s hardware technology.
