World renowned Japanese ICT Company Fujitsu, has been going around places on its annual Fujitsu World Tour 2017. The event aims to underline how co-creation has always been central to Fujitsu’s partnership approach, and why this is so vital in a digital world. A global stop of this event was the country’s capital New Delhi, India and on the occasion, ELE Times had a tête-à-tête with Fujitsu’s Andy Stevenson, Head of Middle East, Turkey and MD, India along with Mehul Doshi, Country Head, Products & Solution Business, who together shared their views on India as a potential market for Fujitsu and the company’s expertise and innovative solutions for Indian market. Excerpts from the interview.
ELE Times: What is the growth story of Fujitsu in India?
Andy: In the last two three years in Fujitsu we started to prioritise our investment in India. Historically we have not been present here in big scale, but we really want to bring the best of the solution from Fujitsu. Whatever we are doing in a global arena we want to bring it and apply here in India. The opportunity is in the new digital era and India as an economy is growing so dramatically, this is fantastic for Fujitsu.
ELE Times: What is the Fujitsu Word Tour 2017 is all about, as you spoke about the human centric innovation and digital co-creation?
Andy: Human-centric innovation is really Fujitsu’s philosophy about how IT can improve the lives of the individuals. The power of any company, institution, or society is based on how empowered the individual is. On that basis those individuals becomes more creative. So it is a very powerful positive cycle of events that basically drives the company, individuals, society to be more successful.
Digital co-creation is Fujitsu’s response to the fact that with so many businesses facing digital challenge the reality is that there are so many different factors to the way that the digital is impacting the businesses. In a positive sense, creating great opportunity for the businesses but it also creating some great challenges especially to business model. All types of business model from Uber, Airbnb, are fundamentally changing the ways that major industries are being challenged. Digital Co-creation is Fujitsu’s approach in supporting customers to go on a journey to address those issues. Either to grow the business or defend the business.
ELE Times: What are the initiatives taken in India in terms of the innovation and the co-creations?
Andy: There are a couple of major technology themes we have had. Fujitsu has a great portfolio of innovations in high performance computing. In many aspects, high performance computing, big data, analytics is one of the big challenges and also a big opportunity. That’s an major theme where we are innovating and building in India. We have also created HPC centre of excellence in India and essentially we are using that platform demonstrate the customers what HPC can do to transform their landscape, solve some of the problem in real time that they have been facing over in many decades. The other thing is around IoT. So Fujitsu has a very strong history in the manufacturing sector. Obviously there are many car manufacturing companies who are our major clients. And we are using IoT technology and we are using Industry 4.0 techniques and technology to bring innovations to them. So those are probably two main digital themes we are going on so far.
ELE Times: How is Fujitsu helping the enterprises in Smart City and IoT?
Andy: Fujitsu has a number of solutions based on our cloud platform. Fujitsu has an innovated technology and we have a global cloud partner which is K5 and we have a cloud HybridIT infrastructure platform called Meta-Arc. Meta-Arc basically brings whole bunch of innovations in terms of the delivery of either private cloud solutions or basically new HybridIT solutions to client. These are the types of techniques we are bringing into our customers in India they will help them grow more successfully.
Mehul: When it comes to smart city project specifically, we get involved with the large systems integrators from day one. The portfolio of solutions that we carry is immense. Right from putting up things which is connecting at the back of the sense could it be the engineering stations, large-storage stations, the server units, or putting up the console systems in the control room. We have expertise on each of these aspects of business that we talk about. We work with large system integrators, and we understand their landscape the way in which they are trying to capture on the video analysis and put up the entire solutions when it comes to project like smart cities or surveillance and soldiering. That’s our play on smart city and surveillance.
ELE Times: What is the response you have received of now in india ?
Mehul: Response has been amazingly well. Fujitsu is not a “me-too” type of strategy or an organization. We have more than lakh of a patents and we have always believed to keep innovations at the front when we go and meet our customers to understand their pain-points. And looking into them we create solutions which are unique to the customers. We work with every application vendor over here to make specific solutions which are guaranteed to those customers. Be it automotive, be it educational research, be it banking and finance industry, be it insurance industry, or be it defence industry. We work very closely with customers with all those aspects, give them solutions which are extremely latest and is the need of the hour and again it’s not a me-too type of strategy.
ELE Times: What is the typical challenge you face in India while dealing with your clients?
Mehul: The technology acceptance is low compared to other countries which we look through for example agriculture, we have world class technology that we use that could tell that what kind of reap your land would give six years down the line, but for sure we can’t go to an agricultural site in India and tell them what kind of technology they may use. The technology that we have in the country are there which are already been used in Japan or Germany and these are very advanced nations to what the country India is. So it is an advantage in a way as they are tried and tested solutions which comes in through but the acceptance or delivering the same in their organizations is bit slow.
ELE Times: Can we elaborate on Fujitsu’s role on Automation or maybe the Smart Cities for the IoT and Industry 4.0?
Mehul: When you talk about Automation in the industry, there are four waves of digitalisation, the first wave that came into the industry was Internet, which is like far-gone now. The second wave was E-Commerce, which has become extremely famous now. The third wave is, the wave of automation, to speak right now it is going on. The industry is looking in terms of automation which could be machine oriented, be process oriented, and it is majorly coming in from the manufacturing sector. Organisations are being getting into this process and they are looking in for some very advanced types of solutions, which could lead and deliver this type of automated solutions what the industry needs right now. So this wave was already on. Fourth wave, which we speak where we are arriving in as of right now is the wave of Robotics, AI and Machine learning. Few organisations in this country are already there. But they are just a handful of. But that’s the place where the world is going in to. So sooner or later, you will find things coming up on those lines.
ELE Times: How are you gearing up for Industry 4.0 and 5G and how is it going to revolutionize the entire system?
Mehul: When we talk about delivering such high level solutions, the basic thing from the technology perspective is to deliver more performance in the same amount of watt. The solutions by Fujitsu will give you 20 times more per watt as compared to what happening right now.
For example, highly precise surveillance solutions and devices installed at public places needs extreme power. Fujitsu’s new systems are designed in a way where it consumes lesser power to give you more performances per watt. That’s the basic ideology of designing the entire solutions. Or you could talk about the weather forecasting which is a similar example of systems which could predict Tsunami or earthquakes or monsoon. Advanced countries already have such robust system which can give weather prediction on an early basis. But it is on its wait where all the solutions and technology are arriving.
ELE Times: If we talk about the entire portfolio of Fujitsu, what could be your market here in India?
Mehul: The portfolios which we carry right now has some world-class services. Predominantly we work very closely with SAP, Service Now, Microsoft, Oracle that could be end-to-end consultation or making them achieve their license business, putting up services, transformations, migrations, green-field projects, everything put together. It is a wide portfolio. We talk about data centre, automation, client-computing automation, third party automation, and portfolio management, organisations who are national, trans-national, and international, where we hold soft-services. For example a company has offices in 46 locations all across the world, sitting in your desk you can detect any fault in any of these offices and at which level, from just a screen at your desk and will tell you the next course of action. The market is massive and our strategy is much more different where we go and meet the customers who sees value in Japanese innovation and in German manufacturing. Till date each of our product comes in from German Factory.
ELE Times: Which is the fastest growing region in the world leaving aside successful geographies like China or Japan? How big is Fujitsu globally?
Andy: Well India is certainly one of the fastest growing region for Fujitsu in terms of just percentage growth. Obviously our market position in market in EMEA or Japan is significantly larger. But we see India a bigger opportunity for us.
Fujitsu is currently a forty million dollar corporation and we are ranked in top five IT service globally and we have held that position for the last 15-20 years. So it is a position that we intend to keep. But we feel that this new digital era will brings us some new innovation and opportunities and Fujitsu is investing very heavily. Fujitsu holds more patents in AI than any other company globally, something we are really proud of.
