Eric the IT wizard is proud of his new invention and wants to say 'Thanks for paying for IT again'

Think of your IT infrastructures. They’re the systems that drive your business applications, right? Like at Ford Motor Co and HSBC and BT and, well, everywhere else. Sure, there are detail differences, but about 80% of what most businesses do, infrastructure-wise, is common.

So why did you let your IT suppliers build special ones for you? Why didn’t you fi nd someone who could sell you the common, commodity 80% and then add the tricky bits, charging a fraction of the price, for a fraction of the invention?

Why? Because until three years ago, nobody could do such a thing. The IT industry thought standardisation was a dirty word. Silicon Valley’s highly paid geeks didn’t get off on doing things over and over – the road to fame was doing things new and different!

It cost a fortune. But the world is now waking up to the fact that unnecessary invention has poured billions down the drain. Standardisation is the word on everyone’s lips and has become the Next Big Thing.

Except at Fujitsu, where it’s the Last Big Thing.

At the risk of your throwing this magazine at the office cat, we have to tell you that since 2003, a lot of Japanese businesses have been getting their IT infrastructures quite a bit cheaper than you have. Even more annoying, they’ve had them installed faster, they’ve worked better, they’ve failed less often and they cost less to support.

So who are these lucky businesses with all that money still in the bank? Well, they’re Fujitsu customers like Yame General Hospital, Maruzen Book Store and one of Japan’s top oil businesses.

Yes, three years ago, Fujitsu cracked standardisation of IT infrastructures. We invested millions in working out how to design them, build them, test them, commission them and run them. We tried to break them, over and over again.

Then, when they worked every time, we sold them to our customers for less than we would have charged had we invented each of them a wheel of their own.

Are they getting poverty-spec ‘one size fi ts all’ computing? Hardly. You couldn’t get much more different than a hospital, a bookshop and an oil company. Or more demanding. Indeed, all these customer’s systems are utterly bespoke where it matters, which is about 20% of the time. The rest of the time they’re just cheaper, more robust, more resilient and less expensive. Prove it? Certainly.

Medical records in record time
Yame General Hospital, in Japan’s Fukuoka prefecture, serves a community of 140,000 people. They needed to improve efficiency and chose to do it with an electronic medical records system (EMR).

Such things are usually complex, slow and expensive to introduce, but Fujitsu used TRIOLE standard building blocks and developed the solution around them.

The hospital paid a lower initial cost and is now enjoying greater agility (new system requirements are deployed 30% faster), greater flexibility (temporary TRIOLE blocks can be ‘plugged in’ to cope with demand spikes), 50% better availability and, as advertised, reduced TCO.

Accelerated accountability
One of Japan’s oldest oil companies had to move quickly from independence to stock exchange listing. This entailed a revolution in everything, including accounting, taxation and business information. A whole new IT infrastructure was required.

A Fujitsu TRIOLE based solution was chosen with the result that deployment was faster, costs were lower and flexibility, reliability and agility are now higher than they would have been had someone sold them their very own re-invented wheel.

Twice the books, half the time
Maruzen is one of Japan’s oldest book sellers and, as you’d expect, online competition is an issue.

They decided to improve their e-Commerce system, but wanted to do it in combination with their stores, and with a small solution that could quickly expand should sales demand it.

TRIOLE was the only sensible choice. Rapid deployment with remarkable flexibility and agility and 50% lower initial system construction time were exactly what they needed.

Today, 2 million titles are in stock, sales are growing apace and Maruzen say their ‘clicks and mortar’ approach is just the opening chapter in an exciting new business future. “What we want from Fujitsu is for them to keep providing us with wonderful solutions” says Katsushi Takahashi of Maruzen.

Goodbye Eric
Few people other than Eric need telling that standardisation in IT is obvious, essential and well overdue. It’s an idea whose time has come and you can read and attend earnest discussions on the subject almost everywhere.

If, however, you don’t really need more confi rmation that saving cost, deployment time and complexity would be a good idea, talk to Fujitsu, where standardisation has been happening for years and can be part of your next infrastructure system as of now.