Fujitsu Wants to Hit $10 Billion in North American Sales by 2010

Published: April 26, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Fujitsu Computer Systems, the part of the Fujitsu-Siemens partnership that sells products into the North American market, threw open the doors at a new TRIOLE Integration Center in its Sunnyvale, California, headquarters last week and parent Fujitsu used the occasion to announce its intention to grow its North American IT business so it will hit $10 billion by 2010.

The task of producing such growth falls on the shoulders of Toshio Morohoshi, president and chief executive officer of Fujitsu Computer Systems. Exactly what his plan is remains unclear, but Fujitsu has always held its cards really close to its vest. "We will manage this growth with both an organic and an acquired growth strategy," he said at the event. The TRIOLE strategy and related products are at the heart of Fujitsu's plans. TRIOLE is roughly akin to the On Demand strategy from IBM and Adaptive Enterprise from Hewlett-Packard. TRIOLE is a set of products and practices for Windows, Unix, and Linux platforms that delivers virtualization, automation, and integration of complex systems, which allows them to be more flexible, easier to manage, and cheaper. The key to TRIOLE is something Fujitsu has developed in Japan called Platform Integration (PI) templates, which allow Fujitsu to pre-integrate various components on the servers it sells and thus ship a pre-configured and manageable system to customers.

Fujitsu, through various business units, had about $4 billion in sales in 2005, and will have to do a lot of growing to hit that $10 billion target. An average of 26 percent over the next four years will do the trick, but high growth at the front end of the period would mean that Fujitsu would not have to push it so hard at the end of the decade. And a few quick acquisitions would make hitting that number a whole lot easier. Fujitsu has hinted that it might make some acquisitions in the storage area, where it is weaker than rivals Hitachi, EMC, and IBM. A number of companies, including 3PAR, BlueArc, NexSAN, DotHill, Xyratex, and the Adaptec's NAS business are possibilities. A server acquisition seems unlikely, given that Fujitsu-Siemens has its own PrimePower Sparc64, PrimeQuest Itanium, and Primergy X64 server lines already. It might be politically unsavvy for Fujitsu to try to buy either Silicon Graphics or Cray, but these are options if Fujitsu wants to tap the fast-growing HPC server market.