Fujitsu Announces the Ongoing Worldwide Rollout of Cloud Service K5 as an Enabling Platform for Accelerating Digital Transformation

London/Luxembourg, June 01, 2016 Fujitsu today announces the ongoing global rollout of its next-generation IaaS and PaaS cloud service, Fujitsu Cloud Service K5. This is the first cloud computing platform that enables digital transformation through seamlessly integrating traditional IT environments into new cloud-based technologies. The new Fujitsu cloud service accelerates application development and brings together enterprise-grade reliability, performance and scalability with the cost efficiency of open source-based cloud technology.

A key part of the Fujitsu Digital Business Platform MetaArc, K5 delivers a comprehensive set of technologies designed to enable organizations to develop and deploy new cloud-native applications – dubbed ‘Fast IT’ or Systems of Engagement. At the same time, K5 allows customers to exploit the value of their traditional or ‘Robust IT’ installations, also known as Systems of Record, through seamless and consistent integration into new cloud applications.

As a consequence, Fujitsu enables organizations to capture the value in their legacy systems when modernizing IT environments. Customers can take advantage of K5’s powerful capabilities in the areas of application integration and development, as well as the wider capabilities of MetaArc in leveraging automated multi-cloud delivery and management, extended across all popular cloud platforms.

Duncan Tait, Director and Corporate Executive Officer, Executive Vice President and Head of Europe, Middle East, India & Africa and the Americas at Fujitsu, comments: “Fujitsu Cloud Service K5 enables customers to embrace digital transformation, by combining the economics of open source with the robustness of enterprise-class systems and a wealth of platform services. Fujitsu is making a significant investment in this new digital enablement platform and services which ensures that legacy systems can be fully integrated with cloud native applications.”

MetaArc and K5 facilitate fast-track creation and deployment of new solutions
Fujitsu is providing the spark for innovation, since its MetaArc platform enables fast track application development. This creates new value through the digitalization of existing enterprise IT services, achieving fast and effective integration in new hybrid IT environments. Greatly accelerated release cycles allow organizations to more rapidly test and bring new services to market, or fail fast and start over without losing too much momentum. Thanks to K5’s seamless open architecture and MetaArc’s ability to run and manage workloads on any chosen platform, new systems can run both within the public cloud and within customers’ own environments.

The integration of UForge technology – from recent Fujitsu acquisition UShareSoft – into the K5 System Factory Service helps enable automated migration and application deployment/release, and supports all market-leading cloud platforms, both on- and off-premise, not just Fujitsu cloud services. This functionality has enabled one K5 pilot customer, among the world’s largest telecommunications companies, to realize a 30-plus percent improvement in iterative releases, for a mission critical billing application.

Open, agile and compatible
By making the bold move away from proprietary stacks in favor of an open source-based architecture for K5, Fujitsu also delivers previously unattainable cost efficiencies and opens the door to lower Total Cost of Ownership. K5 means enterprises significantly reduce vendor lock-in, due to the underlying OpenStack architecture – which is backed by robust Service Level Agreements and service credits measured from the moment any issue arises, another feature which sets K5 apart from other cloud services.

Available in four delivery models – public cloud, virtual private hosted, dedicated and dedicated on-premise – K5 is the industry’s first single, agile cloud architecture to use the same approach for all versions. These are all underpinned with 99.99 percent availability, SLAs and the truly enterprise-grade support that is required to deliver mission critical systems from the cloud.

Fujitsu is already transforming its own internal IT estate, exploiting legacy services with new systems for a quick return on investment, as it migrates all of its 640 business systems and 13,000-plus servers to K5. At the same time, Fujitsu is giving back, through software know-how contributions to OpenStack that are centered on enterprise-class enhancements.