Fujitsu UK & Ireland

• Fujitsu makes the first of four European Public and Virtual Private K5 cloud deployments available in the UK, following large scale deployment in Japan
• New cloud platform enables operational efficiency, digitalisation and Hybrid IT for UK customers and supports location-independent services throughout the EMEIA region
• K5 offers fully scalable OpenStack-based services for enterprises to support both Systems of Record (Robust IT) and Systems of Engagement (Fast IT), with VMWare and bare metal options coming soon

London, July 20, 2016

Fujitsu Cloud Service K5 becomes fully operational today, hosted in the UK from two Tier III/List X data centres in Greater London. This provides UK/EU data residency for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS), creating a high performance, fully resilient and secure platform service to meet the needs of customers wishing to run line-of-business applications in the cloud while also developing and deploying native cloud applications.

The Fujitsu Cloud Service K5 includes the open source PaaS application Cloud Foundry, which is favoured by customers in many vertical sectors including the UK’s GDS (Government Digital Services). K5 enables Hybrid IT through the inclusion of Apigee, which fully exploits the potential of data within existing legacy systems – also known as ‘Robust IT’ – by providing the secure integration and connection of digital systems. Furthermore, the K5 platform also enables fully automated blueprint and workload management, drawn from Fujitsu’s recent acquisition of UShareSoft.

Mark Phillips, Head of Hybrid IT at Fujitsu EMEIA, said:

“Fujitsu Cloud Service K5 is creating real excitement in the marketplace due to its ability to support both line of business and digital applications. We are seeing unprecedented interest and demand from across the EMEIA region. K5 is also getting attention thanks to its support for the full spectrum of Hybrid IT including public and private cloud and the capability to integrate and leverage existing ‘Robust IT’ systems. Combined with K5’s support for OpenStack and the forthcoming availability of support for VMware and platforms like SAP that require bare metal, we have a cloud service that is gaining real traction. With full operational availability now in the UK, we are focusing on further deployments in the EMEIA region.”

With K5, Fujitsu provides enterprise customers with simplified, standardised cloud services at scale. New K5 data centres planned in Finland, Germany and Spain – combined with private, dedicated K5 deployments – mean that customers can deploy location-independent services firstly across the EMEIA and Asia regions. Fujitsu is also planning further K5 data centres for 2017 in Singapore, North America and Australia^[1] .

Through the adoption of K5, enterprises can reduce complexity, accelerate innovation and improve time to market. K5 unlocks the value contained within existing ‘Robust IT’ infrastructures through seamless and consistent integration with new cloud-native business services. As a consequence, release cycles are accelerated by up to 30 percent, reducing development cycles and ensuring a fast move from proof of concept to full production services.

Fujitsu Cloud Service K5, as the engine of Fujitsu’s Digital Business Platform MetaArc, also makes it easier and more cost effective than ever for enterprises to fully embrace digital transformation, since it leverages the cost efficiency of OpenStack and open source-based cloud technology. K5 provides 100 percent infrastructure and application compatibility across all deployment modes, enabling integration and collaboration with other open platforms. This achieves a lower Total Cost of Ownership and ensures greater enterprise agility.

K5 is underpinned with 99.99 percent availability Service Level Agreements (SLAs), measured from the point of unavailability, offering the true enterprise-grade support that is required to deliver mission critical systems from the cloud.

Fujitsu is already receiving a rapid return on investment as it transforms its own internal IT estate, exploiting legacy services with new systems and migrating all of its 640 business systems and 13,000-plus servers to K5. Fujitsu plans to offer the same benefits to customers, drawing on the skills and experience gained during the migration process.

¹ Data centre rollout is subject to change