Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST for Campus Now Supporting UPM

Kuala Lumpur, January 09, 2014

Fujitsu, a leading provider of ICT-based business solutions, today announced that Universiti Putra Malaysia (‘UPM’), a leading local research university, has opted for the Fujitsu PRIMEQUEST open server technology as part of a core IT transformation investment; Making the university the first PRIMEQUEST user in the country.

According to UPM’s Director of InfoComm Development Center (iDEC), Khairulmizam Samsudin (Ph.D), UPM has embarked on several IT system upgrade projects to boost the campus’ operational efficiency as well as to fulfil the standard accounting compliance initiated by the local government.

Dr. Khairulmizam says, “UPM is revamping its IT support systems to facilitate more researches for national developments while reducing the operational costs at the same time. The deployment of Fujitsu’s PRIMEQUEST servers has integrated our systems across departments into the central business operation environment, and also will reduce our annual recurring software expenses by up to 50 per cent.”

In addition, UPM also adopted the Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers to replace their existing legacy systems to support their growing human resources (HR) application workloads, and protect mission critical HR applications from hardware or software failures during migration to other environments such as on the Cloud.

“Before rolling out the new PRIMERGY servers, our HR Payroll system took 3 hours to compute, now it is 75% faster and completes in approximately 45 minutes.”

Dr. Khairulmizam adds that the overall upgrade of UPM’s IT infrastructures is part of the university’s effort to secure the business continuity and adhere to the ISMS/IEC 27001 2007 certification⁽¹⁾ which has already been awarded to UPM. It is also for compliance with the Standard Accounting System for Government Agencies (known as SAGA⁽²⁾.

The Fujitsu servers were purchased in two phases (March and April 2013). Today, the servers are fully operational and supporting UPM's operations.

Fulfilling the Local Demands for Mission Critical Open Server System

According to Edward Ling, Senior Manager of Platform Products for Infrastructure Services and Solutions, Fujitsu Malaysia, “Fujitsu brought in the PRIMEQUEST open server technology to Malaysia in early 2013. UPM was the first customer who bought the system immediately right after its official sales initiated. It clearly indicated a strong demand for high reliability and high performance servers in this market.”

Ling adds that more businesses seeking open platforms for their mission-critical operations to avoid vendor dependency and optimise their return-on-investment (ROI) on IT infrastructures, making PRIMEQUEST server systems a feasible alternative for enterprise customers in Malaysia.

“PRIMEQUEST’s mainframe-like enterprise platform reliability, error prevention and self-healing capabilities allow organizations to run mission-critical computing with industry open standards supporting multiple operating system (OS) platforms - such as Microsoft Windows and Linux OS, as well as industry-grade software and databases.”

Ling ends, “We continue to see encouraging interests on PRIMEQUEST open server technology from other industries including commercial, education, retail, communications, public sector, and financial services,” adding that this year Fujitsu Malaysia is expecting its PRIMEQUEST server systems to generate a new stream of revenue to its IT Platform Product division.