Fujitsu Australia turns 40

Fujitsu celebrated 40 years operating in Australia on Friday, releasing an eBook to mark the occasion.

Called The First 40 Years, the eBook chronicles the experiences down under of arguably Japan’s most enduring technology company.

From its early mainframe days with just 100 staff in the early 1970s, the company has grown to be seen as a true industry powerhouse and one of the most successful IT service providers in Australia employing around 5,000 people.

“We are proudly one of Fujitsu’s most successful subsidiaries and have a firmly embedded culture that is determined to satisfy the evolving technology and service needs of our customers,” said Mike Foster, CEO Fujitsu A/NZ.

In attendance at the 40^th birthday celebrations were all but one of Fujitsu’s six CEOs to have served the company in Australia. Mike Rydon, George Ranucci and Rod Vawdrey were the first, second and third CEOs, with Rod Vawdrey the fifth to hold the position. Fourth serving CEO Phil Kerrigan was not in attendance.

Current CEO Mike Foster said the company can lay claim to many firsts in Australia, in particular its pioneering investments into cloud and data centre infrastructure.

“We have built an industrial-strength cloud offering delivered from both coasts of Australia serving the needs of many high-profile customers. We are capitalising on this early success in cloud and extending our offerings in areas of mobility and virtual end-user computing to satisfy the growing demand from our customers in this area.”

Fujitsu launched its commercial cloud offering in 2010 and has invested around $170 million in building infrastructure supporting it.

Other key milestones for Fujitsu Australia include:

• Fujitsu’s 2009 acquisition of KAZ was one of the largest deals of its kind in Australian ICT history, and instantly made Fujitsu a major services player.
• Fujitsu was the first vendor to provide a contract with a guaranteed uptime.
• In 1991 the DRIVES system at the NSW RTA was the largest commercial Unix site in the world, running on Fujitsu mainframes.
• In 1986 Fujitsu sold a game-changing research supercomputer to ANU, the first supplied outside Japan; in 2012 Fujitsu sold another supercomputer to ANU which will take Australia’s research to new levels in areas such as weather and climate modelling, computational chemistry, particle physics, astronomy, material science, microbiology, nanotechnology and photonics.
• The Australian Bureau of Statistics still refers to Fujitsu as a partner even though the ABS retired its mainframe in 2006. Fujitsu’s historic 1977 ABS tender win marked a new era in enterprise systems in Australia with a large deal on a global scale.
• Fujitsu took its competition by surprise with a provocative exhibition at Brisbane’s Expo 88, winning the Golden Platypus award for best stand at the show.
• Fujitsu Australia Software Technology (FAST) was the first major vendor software development centre in Australia.