Fujitsu brings public cloud 'Try and Buy' offer to Caribbean

The Jamaica Observer, Sunday, June 12, 2011

FUJITSU last week announced the introduction of its global public cloud platform under a "Try and Buy" offer to local companies. Already launched in Japan, Australia, Singapore, the UK and North America, the Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform will be launched as a free trial of its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering up until August 31, 2011.

"What's unique about our offering is that we are providing local companies a try and buy model with very aggressive total costs for those needing basic cloud services but with the added value of support services included," said Fujitsu Caribbean executive vice-president for strategy operations John Slaytor.

He added: "Until August 31, at no cost, companies will enjoy the benefits of enterprise class, secure and highly available compute, storage, and network capacity via a web-based, self-service portal; with a seamless move to pay when the trial period expires. No-one else is offering this at this time and we are delighted to be able to allow organisations who are thinking about cloud services, an opportunity to experience the breadth of the solutions on offer at no charge and without any commitments. For the trial period, organisations can access Fujitsu's Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering for application testing and development, as well as high-performance processing for workloads such as data analytics."

Slaytor said Fujitsu has already started sending invitations to select customers and is hoping to attract other organisations interested in registering for the free trial of the Fujitsu cloud services.

Fujitsu Caribbean said it is introducing locally the same cloud services offered by the firm around the world, making it extremely easy for multinational enterprises to service their infrastructure needs locally in multiple locations. The platform is built on open standards with published APIs and includes 24/7 global support for the infrastructure platform. The Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform incorporates multi-tier security for a true enterprise-grade environment. The company said its browser interface makes it simple to build, provision and manage secure environments for complex workloads, adding that provisioning is highly flexible and availability guaranteed to be at least 99.95 per cent. The Fujitsu offering supports Microsoft, Linux and CentOS open source-based applications.

"Our approach is based on delivering practical solutions to help clients realise the benefits of cloud computing and help them navigate through the hype. We work with our customers to determine the most optimal cloud solutions for their organisations based on business and technology requirements," said Slaytor. Fujitsu offers a disciplined set of consultancy and transition services to mitigate risk and achieve maximum business value along all phases of the cloud journey. Fujitsu-experienced cloud consultants assist clients in analysing their workload requirements and defining a cloud strategy that appropriately aligns to their business objectives.

The firm said the service will become available for general release on September 1 and will be competitively priced based on actual usage compute, storage, Internet communications and software.

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