The first of Fujitsu’s four European public and Virtual Private K5 cloud deployments has launched in the UK.

Hosted in the UK from two Tier III/List X data centres in Greater London, the K5 cloud service is designed to provide data residency for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Including the open source PaaS application Cloud Foundry, K5 is designed to enable hybrid IT through the inclusion of Apigee, which the company says will fully exploit the potential of data within existing legacy systems.

K5 will also enable fully automated blueprint and workload management, these capabilities come from Fujitsu’s recent acquisition of UShareSoft.

The cloud will offer fully-scalable OpenStack-based services for businesses to support Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement, VMware and bare metal options will be released at a later date.

The company has plans for new data centres in Finland, Germany, and Spain, which when combined with dedicated K5 deployments, will mean that customers will be able to deploy location-independent services across EMEIA and Asia regions.

Fujitsu also has plans for further K5 data centres in 2017 for locations in Singapore, North America, and Australia.

Mark Phillips, Head of Hybrid IT at Fujitsu EMEIA, said: “Fujitsu Cloud Service K5 is creating real excitement in the marketplace due to its ability to support both line of business and digital applications. We are seeing unprecedented interest and demand from across the EMEIA region.

“K5 is also getting attention thanks to its support for the full spectrum of Hybrid IT including public and private cloud and the capability to integrate and leverage existing ‘Robust IT’ systems.”

According to the company businesses will be able to reduce complexity, accelerate innovation, and improve time to market.

K5 will offer 100% of the infrastructure and application compatibility across all deployment modes, this will enable integration and collaboration with other open platforms. Basically, users will be able to pick and choose the applications and deployment method.

Fujitsu said that the cloud offering is underpinned with a 99.99% availability SLA, measured from the point of unavailability.