Martin - Customer Solution Architect
Name: Martin
Job Title: Customer Solution Architect
Business area: IT Solutions
Location: Manchester
Studied: BA Hons (Cantab) Mathematics ( 1st class), MA (Cantab)
Joined: October 1982
What is your role within Fujitsu?
I’ve been involved with IT infrastructure and technical consultancy, but have dabbled in management and in applications.
My role at present has a number of facets, but I’m primarily a process champion for the methods and processes we use in Fujitsu Services for delivering infrastructure design and build projects. This involves extensive liaison and collaboration across the business, writing the processes, advising accounts and projects as well as the coordination and delivery of workshops. In the past 2 years this has involved travel to America, Japan, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands as well as exotic places such as Slough, Staines and Solihull.
I’ve also been involved over the past 2 years with a couple of relatively large bids to multinational companies involving work in Europe as well as working on other corporate initiatives.
How do you feel about your Career opportunities, prospects for progression?
For me, the attraction of Fujitsu Services has always been the range of opportunities that it is able to offer to graduates. In my 25 year career, I have had 4 significant changes of direction as my interests, aspirations and personal circumstances have changed.
Fujitsu works with an incredibly wide range of customers, solving real world business problems by the application of IT. If you’ve ever been frustrated by your inability to work when your PC crashes, imagine designing a solution which 80,000 employees are dependent on. At the other extreme, you may be involved in the transfer of employees into Fujitsu Services from a company outsourcing its IT operations, putting together a business case for investing in a solution, working on joint ventures with partners or even writing a personal profile to go on the company internet site!! The opportunities available are enormous.
What makes you proud to work for Fujitsu Services?
Winning always helps, and for the past 6 years or so, Fujitsu has been on a steady trajectory upwards in terms of winning business and profit. In addition, I know the people responsible for some of the largest systems in the UK, Europe and even the world. We store over 150 million digital images for one client with an additional 3.7 million every week; we provide and support the systems that all the Post Office transactions go through; we provide services which touch the lives of 99% of the UK population, from driving licences to lottery tickets, from census forms to monthly salary cheques and high street shopping. I think those are facts to be proud of.
Do you feel trusted and valued?
Compared with other companies, Fujitsu always has trusted employees and provided a significant amount of freedom and “jobspace” which allows individuals to carve out a niche for themselves within the organisation.
What would you change about Fujitsu Services?
A greater willingness to blow our own trumpet; we’ve always been a bit backwards at coming forwards despite having the best people in the business.
How has Fujitsu Services changed since you joined?
In 1982, I joined and the company was predominantly a mainframe product supplier making its first steps into the distributed systems market. The technologies in use across the industry were largely proprietary and a contract of £1M was felt to be large. Over the years the shifts have been enormous; the era of the PC is here, the bulk of our revenues now come from services not product, a large percentage of the technologies used are open or at least industry standard and contracts of between £100M and £1000M are almost commonplace..
What three words would you use to sum up Fujitsu?
Supportive, successful and professional.
