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In the fiscal year of 2011, Fujitsu invested US$1.2 billion in the cloud computing business and committed to train 5,000 specialists globally by 2012. According to Richard Wern (pictured), Fujitsu Asia’s senior director of regional cloud computing, cloud-related services will account for 30% of Fujitsu’s new business by 2015.

Fujitsu launched three cloud computing solutions in June this year -- Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform, Fujitsu Local Cloud Platform and Fujitsu Cloud Professional Services, and plans to roll out other cloud offerings in the next two years.

According to Wern, Fujitsu developed its cloud services together with customers including Singapore Technologies (ST) Electronics, National Institute of Education and SingPost. “These offerings are part of Fujitsu’s commitment to invest US$40 million in Singapore to develop its cloud offerings here. Fujitsu’s cloud investments in Singapore will help realize the country’s iN2015 master plan and accelerate the adoption of cloud computing for all organizations to build a more human-centric Singapore, one that is reliable and has superior growth prospects,” Wern said.

In the following interview with Asia Cloud Forum, Wern talks about the deployment of cloud storage for National Institute of Education (NIE) Singapore, how CIOs/IT should present the business case of cloud computing, the most impressive cloud technology found in 2011, the key lessons learnt, and his predictions about cloud computing trends in 2012.

Richard Wern: NIE’s Research is one of the three major thrusts in preparing the Singapore Teacher for the 21st century. The National Institute of Education (NIE) Singapore is a university-based teacher education institute 2003.The data center at NIE is one of the critical resources supporting the Institute to reach the destination 2012 as mapped out by its Strategic Plan for the 21st Century Teacher Education.

NIE needed significant ICT infrastructure support for their ongoing research projects. At the same time, with the data center operating at near full capacity, there was no way it could meet the new demands generating from the 30% growth anticipated for the three years leading to 2012. A solution was required to allow for flexibility in deployment, greater end user experience, shorter turnaround time, better project costs and utilization, and without compromising security. NIE wanted to leverage on the consumption and delivery model of cloud to reduce costs, consolidate ICT assets, and improve service levels.

Fujitsu deployed the Cloud Professional Services and through a consultancy study at NIE’s data center, Fujitsu identified one of the major areas for improvement by consolidating all storage systems to substantially reduce its total cost of ownership and increase operation efficiency.

Overall Fujitsu was able to see the cost investment reduced 41% whereas NIE’s original target was 30%. Power consumption was only half as before and saving amounted to approximately US$46,000 per year. This has surpassed NIE’s expectation of only 30%. 

At the same time, three-quarters of the original floor space became available for further expansion far beyond 2012. Environmental costs such as power, cooling and floor space were reduced by consolidation of information in a unified storage infrastructure. The transformed data center enjoys higher operation efficiency and resiliency requires less manpower to run since it is much easier to manage. 

More importantly, Fujitsu provides its customers with the flexibility as customers will not be “locked-in” as each block is easily replace with another best of breed products that served the same function. This signifies that NIE has the control, power and final say to change or replace any block that the vendor’s support is not satisfactory.