As this year’s Fujitsu World Tour landed in London, we were thrilled to announce partnership enhancements with Oracle, VMware and SAP.This is part of
Fujitsu strengthening its multi-cloud integration and operations services and our efforts to address the growing industry-wide cloud skills gap.
These partnership extensions have some exciting implications for businesses operating in a Hybrid IT environment, as enterprises look to embrace the benefits of adopting multi-cloud strategies.
With this in mind, it’s important to recognise the power in the ecosystem, and its advantages for organisations looking to leverage the benefits of hyperscale cloud at an enterprise level.
In this blog post we explore what the ecosystem expansion means for customers, examining how they can leverage the power of the ecosystem, and some of the amazing work that has been completed as a result.
What do we mean by ecosystems?When you think of ecosystems you might think of something biological, but it could be working with suppliers, partners or customers. With 80% of the UK economy being services based, at Fujitsu we believe that to make an impact, organisations should adopt an ecosystem approach.
You can draw similarities between the ecosystems of biology and business. Earlier this decade, on the North American west coast the starfish population went into
rapid decline after the species was hit by a mysterious wasting disease. It’s only been in the last year that scientists have seen the population beginning to recover.
The ecosystem had to adapt and respond to the environment around it, in order to survive (and then thrive).
The same example has relevance in business. Organisations need to adapt to the rapidly changing circumstances around them, with digital disruption and technology transformation all around.
It means customers can look on in excitement when they see the strength of Fujitsu’s ecosystems partners: made up of Microsoft, VMWare, Oracle, SAP and many more.
Helping customers innovate in the cloudFujitsu has been partnered with VMWare for 15 years. At the World Tour Joe Baguley, VMware’s VP & CTO EMEA, talked through some of the wider trends he is seeing for customers when it comes to multi-cloud environments and beyond.
He argued that many organisations are looking to balance the need to give developers more freedom, and being able to benefit from open source velocity and scale.
At the same time, IT teams still need operational consistency and control. They want to be pragmatic, running architectures which are simple and manageable.
As part of the announcement, our partnership has been extended to give customers access to VMware Cloud Foundation, and VMware Cloud on AWS.
“People are looking to evolve their strategy from being just one public cloud to maybe involving multiple public clouds, as well as keeping some workloads on premise,” said Joe.
“So if you’re looking at using multiple public clouds you need to find someone like Fujitsu who can help build an architecture across all of those clouds. We [VMware] bring the technology, Fujitsu brings the expertise, and together you get the ability to cross multiple clouds and build hybrid applications.
This has fantastic implications for enhancing the rich ecosystem which Fujitsu and VMware are a part of.
Making a bigger change through collective impactWhen it comes to solving a problem or creating value, customers can leverage ecosystems through a principle known as collective impact.
It works by creating a group with a common aim, who are judged on the same systems and success metrics across the board. Combine this with the right digital collaboration tools, ways of communicating, and a third party facilitator to act as the ‘backbone’: you then have the ingredients to start making a difference.
It also gives different agents within the ecosystem licence to play to their strengths.
By tapping into an ecosystem, a customer can benefit from the strengths of all the players within that network of partners. An ecosystem is effectively stronger than the sum of its parts.
How is this working in practice?We saw the power of ecosystem at World Tour with some fantastic examples of co-creation and collaboration in action.
One of the most striking examples was the Bloodhound SSC (Super Sonic Car) parked outside the entrance to the venue in North Greenwich. Oracle are the lead cloud partner for the project, and are providing the technology to help Bloodhound collect, analyse and broadcast data from more than 500 sensors installed on the Bloodhound SSC (Super Sonic Car) to classrooms around the world.
They are joined by dozens of others partners on the venture, which hopes to propel the specially-designed rocket car beyond the land speed record. It is an immense technical feat of engineering and collaboration.
But the car is a product of this amazing ecosystem of partners, each bringing their own unique speciality to the table – it uses best-in-class components for every element of the car.
We also saw
contactless payment buckets for our charity partner
MacMillan Cancer Support at World Tour. This was a suggestion which came out of last year’s event, and an ecosystem of people working on the project have brought it to life to help the charity raise more money.
In the modern world of business, creating value through collaboration is fast becoming the norm. And it is in this world of ecosystems where customers will be able to unlock greater value in their organisations by leveraging the power of these partnerships.
Want to catch-up on all the action from this year’s Fujitsu World? Check out the hashtag on Twitter: #FujitsuWorldTour
By Mark Phillips, Fujitsu.
