Tokyo, May 17, 2000 -- Fujitsu Limited today announced that from June, Unix and IA server products will be standardized under the PRIMEPOWER and PRIMERGY brands respectively. This change heralds a move to full standardization of all its server products across the many companies of the worldwide Fujitsu Group. The end of 2000 will see the completion of this drive to server standardization.
The Fujitsu group is very large and has a number of subsidiaries that trade as IT companies under their own names. There is also the fast growing Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Fujitsu's major business alliance with Siemens AG. in Europe, formed last October. Now all similar products will be standardized and the brand image and presence strengthened. In addition Fujitsu and Fujitsu Siemens Computers have agreed to merge their product development and product brands to make customer purchasing decisions easier and more cost effective.
"Before the Internet, having different product brands in different regional markets was not a major issue," said Mr Tatsushi Miyazawa, senior vice president and group president Computer Systems Group, Fujitsu Ltd. "But now with worldwide configure-to-order delivery systems and the necessary economies of scale needed to meet the demands of Web savvy customers, product brand standardization has become essential even for the largest companies."
As well as making it easier for customers to recognize its high quality products, Fujitsu will also use this branding to focus on meeting common customer requirements worldwide. Benefits will also come from common worldwide and regional promotional campaigns, commonality of web sites, benchmarking initiatives and application product integration and certification strategies.
"We see great benefit in offering our original PRIMERGY brand as a platform for all the IA servers in the Fujitsu group as we jointly develop the next generation of such servers with Fujitsu Ltd," said Dr. Joseph Reger, vice president Strategic Marketing of Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "In turn we will be adopting the Solaris based Fujitsu SPARC servers under the brand PRIMEPOWER as our next generation Unix offering."
As a result of this global brand introduction, previous Intel architecture; teamserver, GRANPOWER5000 and European PRIMERGY servers will converge and all be known as PRIMERGY. In addition the GP7000F Unix branded servers will, from June, be known only as PRIMEPOWER.
"Microsoft is pleased with the worldwide launch of Fujitsu's IA server brand, PRIMERGY, which will support Windows 2000 from the workgroup to the datacenter," said Brian Valentine, senior vice president, Windows Division at Microsoft Corp. "Our enterprise customers have told us that reliability and scalability of their network infrastructure and Web servers are their chief concerns. Fujitsu's knowledge of the enterprise market means it understand these concerns, and we look forward to working with them to help customers build cost-effective solutions based on Windows 2000 Server technologies."
"The Solaris operating environment has established itself as delivering the service levels required by enterprise and dot-com companies. Key to the success of the Solaris operating environment has been our consistent strategy and compatibility," said Anil Gadre, vice president and general manager Solaris Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "Sun's close working relationship with Fujitsu supports both companies goals of market leadership and customer satisfaction."
Fujitsu's strategic adoption of Solaris also supports their commitment to both application access and solution choice for customers. A strong and growing base of Solaris users will benefit all companies committing to support of that open standard operating environment including over 12,000 application software areas.
PRIMERGY servers will offer a complete range of products from entry level 1U rackmounted front-end Internet client hosting servers to large Intel and Microsoft based Data Center servers. As a natural extension of this range, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Siemens Computers are now working on the development of Intel IA64 based PRIMERGY servers that will be launched towards the end of 2000. The strategic adoption of Microsoft Windows operating systems will deliver scalability and reliability on all PRIMERGY servers and applications and maximize the reductions in total cost of ownership.
PRIMEPOWER, based on Fujitsu's own SPARC64 GP processors in 2 to 128 processor configurations and with the Solaris open standard operating environment, offer the highest in scalability and world-class performance. They also provide mainframe levels of availability with up to 99.999% for mission critical applications.
* All company/product names mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and are used for identification purpose only.
About Fujitsu Limited
Fujitsu Limited (TSE: 6702) is a leading provider of Internet-based information technology solutions for the global marketplace. Comprising over 500 group companies and affiliates worldwide -- including ICL, Amdahl and DMR Consulting -- it had consolidated revenues of 5.26 trillion yen ($49.6 billion) in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2000. Fujitsu's pace-setting technologies, world-class computing and telecommunications platforms, and global corps of over 60,000 systems and services experts make it uniquely positioned to harness the power of the Internet to help its customers succeed. Altogether, the Fujitsu Group has 188,000 employees and operations in over 100 countries.
Home page: http://www.fujitsu.com/