"We are selecting partners based on skill-sets, not revenue"

Pallab Talukdar, CEO, Fujitsu India in an interaction with DQ Channels, talks about the company's key focus areas like cloud computing, HPC and SAP and how it is taking these new trends to its partners

Can you tell us about the rational behind merging your consulting arm of Fujitsu Group, as part of the Fujitsu India?

With an aim to consolidate our go to market strategy and offer wide range of services to the India customers, we(Fujitsu India) has decided to merge its Fujitsu Consulting India, an IT services consulting arm of Fujitsu Group, as part of the Fujitsu India. The merger has been effective from April 2013. This year, we have identified three specific solution areas as our major thrust, one was we have clearly articulated our cloud strategy for the Indian customers, simplified High Performance Computing (HPC) and bringing out collaboration with SAP landscape. The other big news in the Indian context was that the two sales teams of Fujitsu India and Fujitsu Consulting, earlier known as (Rapidigm Fujitsu Consulting) are now merged together, henceforth Fujitsu India will have single go to market strategy. The two offices of Fujitsu Consulting in Pune and Noida will become the pure global delivery center and all the sales and customers facing activities are consolidated under Fujitsu India.

What would be the core focus of the merged entities?

Fujitsu India's focus has always been around infrastructures services that went along with hardware products like managed services, managed maintenance etc, wherein Fujitsu Consulting domain is very different. There offering includes applications maintenance and support space and custom built application development. Those portfolio of Fujitsu Consulting domain elements was not there earlier, today we believe that with the addition of those portfolio the messaging from Fujitsu's India becomes more comprehensive and now we can do everything from a business consulting, to an application deployment to an application development, to infrastructure managed services and many other service. Giving the perspective, when Rapidigm Fujitsu consulting company started off initially the charter of this was to support offshore customers, but with passage of time and global slowdown, Fujitsu's Consulting has started contributing to the India's operations and supporting customers in India. Currently, we are doing projects for customers in India, we were supporting doing application maintenance and support services for India, custom built application development for India, we have started having good traction from India. Then the question came up of having two go to market strategy which was not synergistic, so now we have now created single combined entity and with single go to market strategy. With having much richer services portfolio.

What are Fujitsu's services offering around SAP landscapes?

Apart from the merger of two entities, another focus area for Fujitus India is services offering, specifically around SAP landscapes, out of 3,000 strength of Fujitus India, 1,000 of people in consulting are with SAP background. Today there are 3-4 distinct areas where the company wants to offer services in SAP such as opportunities in infrastructure refresh, secondly, SAP offerings to private cloud, thirdly the critical area of SAP is its HANA road-map. The company has set strategic roadmap for its customers to move away from relational database to in- memory database, and Fujitsu has critical role to play in providing appliances,consulting and services. These are the new areas, we are now collaborating along with traditional business of SAP will be continued. We are now having complete gamut of offering for SAP portfolio.

Fujitsu has been putting in efforts to simplify High Performance Computing(HPC). Can you please elaborate more on same?

In last 16-17 months, we have seen good success and momentum for HPC India. We have added more than a dozen customers in a year. We have also partnered with five key players in HPC space likes of Wipro, Locuz, CMC and many others, we are working with them. One of the key announcement we have made today we have taken a step in terms of radically simplifying HPC in terms of with our own products and third party products we have a complete certified suites of turnkey solutions which are pre- tested and pre-certified solutions by Fujitsu India. The idea is to bring HPC user interface more user friendly and affordable. We have launched a new set of high performance computing solutions to help clients lower their costs and speed up innovation cycles. Fujitsu has had 40-50 HPC wins (deals) in India in the last two years, which shows how much potential HPC has and the focus we have (on HPC). HPC deals range between USD 10,000 to as much as USD 200,000. There are some larger deals too, depending on the requirement. Other players with HPC offerings include HP and IBM. Our new HPC offerings include server, storage and middleware software. Our new suite of solutions will bring faster, high-end computing within the reach of mid-size and growing companies for the first time.

What are your existing channel partner programs?

In parallel to all these trends and technology focus the company has also streamlined its existing partners strategy, which is now more simple and clear in terms of selection of its partners. We have set guidelines to select our partners. Its not a revenue based target but based on partners skill-sets based. For select partner program we are also offering additional commercial benefits in terms of incentives and back-ends. We will be graduating our select partners to next level which are Expert partners and Select- Expert partners. We are enabling most of the partners to sell these new solutions. We have already transfer knowledge and building depth engagements with our partners. Presently, Fujitsu India has 35 select partners which contribute 70% of the business to the India's revenue.

Rajneesh De/(rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in)

Sandhya Malhotra/(sandhyam@cybermedia.co.in)