At an event in Tokyo Monday, Fujitsu Chairman Naoyuki Akikusa and
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer signed a pact satisfying Microsoft’s
continued quest to put Windows in
larger servers.
The partnership will allow the companies to work together on
Fujitsu’s next-generation Intel Itanium Processor
Family-based server running Windows Server 2003 (expected to launch in the
first half of 2005) and its next-generation Windows Server (code-named
“Longhorn” Server).
Tokyo-based Fujitsu has decades of experience putting together
large-scale systems. The company has several supercomputers on the Top500
list, including a cluster currently ranked number 7 and two mainframes
residing at numbers 22 and 24. Microsoft is starting to make headway into
systems larger than two- and four-way servers.
Microsoft is
exploring
high-performance computing and developing a Windows High Performance
Computing edition.
“Fujitsu’s heritage and strengths in mainframe computing, combined with
Microsoft’s latest Windows Server System software, can enable enterprise
customers to optimize the strategic value of their IT investments on the
Windows platform and better execute on mission-critical objectives,” Ballmer
said in a statement.
In addition to development, Microsoft said it would mesh its .NET
software into Fujitsu’s TRIOLE, the company’s virtualization and
provisioning strategy that competes with IBM, HP and Sun. Microsoft and
Fujitsu said they have been developing TRIOLE Pi (platform integration)
templates, which are building blocks based on Windows Server 2003, the .NET
Framework and SQL Server 2000. In addition, the companies said they will
jointly establish a proof-of-concept center at the Fujitsu IA Solution
Center in Japan in the second half of 2004.
In the system management area, Fujitsu and Microsoft also pledged to
improve the interoperability between Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) and
Fujitsu’s Systemwalker family of products, which includes establishing a
joint engineering support team at the Global Escalation Center at
Microsoft headquarters in the second half of 2004. The goal is to evolve and
enhance Fujitsu’s software products — such as NetCOBOL for .NET and
Interstage Business Application Manager for .NET — to help customers
migrate and reform traditional enterprise applications to next-generation,
Web services-based environments on the Microsoft Windows and .NET platforms.
The companies said the worldwide joint effort should net them
approximately $7.2 billion in 2007, with the sales of Fujitsu hardware
systems, software products and services for platform businesses based on
Microsoft technologies.
