By William Fellows
Despite what sources inside the company told us, Fujitsu Siemens Computers NV wants to make it clear it has no plans to stop reselling EMC Corp storage with its servers. Indeed it has ambitious plans to increase its revenue from EMC sales by 25% in the first year of operations. In UK, France and Italy it expects revenue from EMC storage sales could rise by over 100%. Currently 60% of its entire storage revenue comes from EMC products.
EMC, which is facing increased competition from Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and IBM, hopes to significantly increase its business outside of the US to 50% of total revenue from 37% today, partly by increasing sales in Europe. EMC recently extended its agreement with Siemens to Fujitsu Siemens by signing a three year deal with the group.
As part of the deal Fujitsu Siemens will also market EMC’s Celerra network storage ‘appliance’ servers that usually service a specific application requirement such as file serving. Meantime parent Fujitsu Ltd as well as its Amdahl Corp US unit are now reselling storage appliances made by Network Appliance Inc, EMC’s chief rival in this market.
Fujitsu Siemens says it is EMC’s largest European reseller and has been reselling EMC storage for use with its Unix servers and BS2000/OSD mainframes since 1997. Meantime plug-compatible Fujitsu is readying a new generation of storage products to compete against IBM’s new Shark storage subsystems for mainframes and Unix servers.
Now that Fujitsu has set a target to become the world’s third largest IT supplier by 2001, its various divisions and subsidiaries are discussing how they can better collaborate on products, technologies and channels if it is to have a chance of achieving the goal.
Fujitsu Siemens and Amdahl unit are currently looking at how they might use each other’s channels for their respective products, especially now that Amdahl is taking on Siemens Computer Systems’ US sales operation.
