Fujitsu Forum – Does proper service aggregation start here?

In amongst the inevitable raft of product and service announcements at its annual Forum conference in Munich this week, Fujitsu has managed to come up with a service builder that pulls together most of the integration and service aggregation tools needed to provide a unified cloud management and collaboration environment.   

Known as the Cloud Integration Platform, it sets out to offer a single pane of glass management point for aggregating services together as a unified cloud environment. According to the company’s CTO Dr Joseph Reger, cloud service provision has reached a degree of maturity, and that the time has therefore come when there is now a role for the cloud equivalent of the old school systems integrators.

“That is why cloud integration platforms will be the next big thing,” he said. “The old systems integrators brought together different applications and tools and engineered them into a packaged system that met a user’s needs. That is what the Cloud Integration Platform sets out to achieve.”

Reger sees an opportunity for Fujitsu to not only win some bragging rights by being one of the first into this sector, but also to create some of the standards that will be needed in this area. He noted that it is still a sector of cloud technology where there are not many standards in place.

“There are some emerging out of the open systems area, and Fujitsu has become a member of Openstack to participate more fully,” he said.

The platform is being pitched by the company as a tools for aggregating services together to build the specific service packages that user customers require. Fujitsu is offering it as both a hosted cloud service and as an op-premise system for businesses looking to build private cloud services.

As an aggregation tool it can not only bring together individual applications and service offerings into a unified service, but other cloud services packages as well. This, according to Fujitsu’s Executive Vice President of Solutions, makes it possible for users to `bring their own cloud’. In practice, this would help enterprises pull together the different cloud infrastructures already built by subsidiaries, divisions of departments.

The platform provides full single sign-on capabilities across all the clouds and applications that are aggregated under it. It will also allow enterprises to then build and manage their own applications cloudstores.

Reger sees it being used, over time, for automating compliance issues and routines. This is particularly useful for enterprises operating across borders,  as the Platform allows individual files to be identified as the sensitive ones that cannot leave the country, or perhaps even the datacentre. On the other side of that coin, files can also be identified as suitable for being stored anywhere on the basis of cost or some other factor. And this process can be automated as a function of policy management.

Both Reger and McNaught are aware that the Integration Platform does have long term potential as a key tool for third party service providers looking to move into the service aggregation business. Here, such an aggregator would target a particular vertical business sector and pull together applications, services and even complete cloud environments to create a package of services that can meet the need of businesses in such a sector.

Both acknowledge that some preliminary discussion have been held with third party service providers but that it is too early to have reached any decision on the possibility. One important issue here is that it is still not clear which company might be responsible for managing the billing of  what could be a mix of many different services.

There would also be the question of Fujitsu releasing the Platform as product to be installed and managed by third parties. One option here however, according to McNaught, is that Fujitsu would be willing to host the Platform as a `white labelled’ service.

Coupling the Integration platform with the company’s membership of OpenStack is also pointing at a solution to one of the long-standing concerns many users have with using cloud services. This is the issue of moving their work environment to another service provider in response to the failure of a service provider as a business or some form of significant breach of contract or service agreement.

According to Reger, making this possible was one of the specific use cases the company had in mind in the design of the Platform.  

Another possibility Reger sees for the Platform involves one of the other announcements made at the Forum -  an enhanced version of the company’s The FlexFrame Orchestrator that now manages SAP HANA cloud services implementations. He suggested that this could readily become one of the clouds that could be aggregated into a cloud environment using the Integration Platform.