Fujitsu announces expansion of cloud capability in Western Australia

Fujitsu today announced that it will be implementing a significant upgrade of its Cloud capability in Western Australia. Fujitsu's Malaga Data Centre will be enhanced to include a node of Fujitsu's cloud platform. This will be an expansion of Fujitsu's cloud platform, which is already implemented on the East Coast of Australia. The upgrade will position Fujitsu as the only major global cloud solutions provider with a cloud capability on the East and West coasts of Australia. Fujitsu anticipates that the new capability will be in operation in Western Australia in November 2012.

Organisations in Western Australia will benefit from reduced latency, which can be an issue due to the large distances between the end user and data centres on the East Coast or offshore. A direct cloud presence in WA cloud also means that customers migrating enterprise applications or large databases can upload data more efficiently via the local connection. Customers in other states will be able to use the WA cloud for business continuity planning (BCP) purposes.

The WA expansion of the Cloud platform is another step in the evolution of Fujitsu's extensive cloud capability, which includes a complete suite of cloud services including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) incorporating Collaboration as a Service (CaaS), Messaging as a Service (MaaS), IT Management as a Service (ITMaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).

Mike Foster, Chief Executive Officer of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand, confirmed that the new Cloud capability is consistent with the company's strategy of investment in cloud, applications services and managed services in Australia. "We made a strategic investment in our cloud a few years ago and our early lead in the market has allowed us to build additional capability on our already strong base," he said. "There is a strong business case for establishing a cloud presence in Western Australia. The new Cloud capability will provide a local entry point for customers on the West coast, and will also address the needs of our national customers, with geographical separation of sites within the same country."

The announcement of the cloud expansion in Western Australia is good news for Fujitsu's customers in the West. Robert Lislois, Executive General Manager, Western Australia, said "We have already attracted a lot of interest from new as well as existing customers in this region and this capability will help us to meet the specific needs of organisations in Western Australia in relation to cloud services."