Exclusive: Q&A with Fujitsu's Mike Foster

CRN: You’ve had three years of solid growth. What do you put that down to?

MF: We made a big investment in cloud about three years ago. Back then, no one understood what it was. We made a decision, strategically, that customers were concerned about data management and where their data was resident. So we made a decision to have major infrastructure in Australia.

CRN: How important is data sovereignty to your clients?

MF: Generally you spend as much time talking to clients and through risk and governance committees as the IT department.

CRN: Cloud wasn’t really talked about three years ago. How did you hit on it as a strategy?

MF: The other thing we did three years ago was that we knew we were going to win new clients, and increase our share of existing wallet.

And so we used the cloud. Strategically, cloud is agreat enabler. How did we hit on cloud?

There was a couple of us that got in a room, talked about cloud, what is it, and we explained it and then decided to go for it.  Since then we have built data centres and capacity.

CRN: Are you now in a period of consolidation? Have your data centre investments finished for the moment?

MF: The short answer is yes, we have facilities in most major states linked with dark fibre. So when we built the datacentres we planned for expansion. We built the environmentals, but not the halls. It’s a bit like Lego.

I don’t think we would build more datacentres, however. There are so many new entrants, I’ll wait for the cycle to come around and then just buy excess capacity.

CRN: What would you invest in if it wasn’t for cloud?

MF: I would look around cloud based apps and capabilities I could build as a service industry. Key industries to supply services to.

CRN: What are your key verticals?

MF: Traditional. Retail. Transport health and emergency services. Defence, and other secure agencies. Customs. DFAT. We have 1000 people with security clearances.

Banking and finance are also big and now we are seeing resources such as oil and gas beginning to spend.

CRN: How important is the channel?

MF: Very important. We are very focused on Fujitsu first, and so selling our servers and storage. Also, the mid market is an area where I don’t really touch personally, and so we rely on channel expertise.

Finally, we are going to white label our cloud services, and we are looking to the channel for that.