Fujitsu opens 'Saasification Factory' at Cebit to fill cloud app store

Fujitsu Technology Solutions has already convinced 50 independent software vendors (ISVs) to sell their business software through its online Business Solutions Store, and aims to add 100 more by the year end, it announced at the Cebit trade show in Germany yesterday.

Deutsche Telekom announced earlier that it has three ISV partners for its cloud store, Business Marketplace. Fujitsu and Deutsche Telekom will find themselves in competition with HP, which plans to announce further details of its cCell cloud platform later this week, and Atos, which yesterday appointed a CEO for Canopy, its cloud store joint venture with EMC.

In Fujitsu's Business Solutions Store, users can rate apps and vendors can sell subscriptions by the day, week or month, allowing users to pay for just what they need, said Marcel Schneider, managing director of Fujitsu Technology Solutions Germany, in a news conference at Cebit.

Fujitsu has set up a "SaaSification Factory" at its stand, where developers can learn how to move a data centre-ready app to the cloud by rewriting it to Fujitsu's APIs. That can be accomplished in a matter of days rather than the years it would otherwise take to rewrite the entire source code for cloud deployment, Schneider said.

There was also good news for companies wanting to keep things in house, rather than in the cloud.

Fujitsu is releasing a Windows version of its FlexFrame, an adaptive computing environment for SAP software, some nine years after it launched on Linux and seven years after the Solaris version appeared. FlexFrame is a combination of hardware and software for improving the reliability and efficiency of large SAP installations.

There was also something for smaller businesses running SAP Business One: an analytics hardware appliance running SAP HANA on a Fujitsu Primergy TX300 S6 tower server.

Jens-Peter Seick, head of research and development for Fujitsu Technology Solutions, also dropped a few hints about some new dual-socket Primergy servers the company will unveil shortly.

The servers will offer up to 70% greater performance per watt and handle 33% more data than existing systems, and will feature in an Intel announcement to be made today, he said. Intel is widely expected to announce its long-awaited Xeon E5 server chips at a news conference scheduled that day.