CIOIN

How would you define Fujitsu's presence in India?

Wilson: I'd say we are a new, exciting entrant into the India market. In the past, we have traditionally done work with Japanese organizations. But in the last six months, we have fundamentally changed the focus of what we're doing in India. We've appointed a local Indian CEO, for example (Pallab Talukdar moved into the position in May 2009).

Why has Fujitsu been so slow to take off in India?

Wilson: Like I said, traditionally India operations have been a reactive delivery vehicle for the Japanese business. The India operations would deliver on whatever sales order was made in Japan. The go-to market was not as clearly defined or as aggressive as it is currently.

So what's behind the new aggression? What's your strategy now?

Wilson: There are a number of points. One of them is Fujitsu buying out the Siemens component of the 10-year-old Fujitsu-Siemens deal. That's allowed Fujitsu to have one global footprint. Taking that forward, the next step was to start putting geographies together in clusters. So we have a Japanese cluster, a continental Europe cluster and an American one. In that development, India became part of continental Europe and with that it got a whole new focus.

It sounds like India is just along for the ride. Is there a specific India push?

Wilson: As I mentioned, we follow a geographical cluster approach. Because of this transnational approach, we don't have to look at countries; we have an organization that can deliver across the globe. When you come down to a cluster level, say the Middle East, Africa and India (Wilson's area of responsibility) we define key and focus countries. But to answer your question: the fact that Kai Flore, our president and CEO, went out and requested specifically that India be included in his patch, shows our seriousness about India. And also we have Satoru Hayashi, executive vice chairman of the board, on our executive sponsor board.

Talukdar: It goes right up to the top.

Can you back up that level of seriousness with targets?

Wilson: As a rule we don't share numbers by country. That said, the criterion is not so much around a revenue growth expectation; it's about a customer base. This is not a race, this is a journey.

Do you have another metric?

Talukdar: At this point in time, we don't. We are looking at broad-basing our customers. As Mark mentioned, the previous set up was focused on Japanese companies. Today, we are focusing on three sectors: the media, manufacturing and government. I would like to measure our success by the number of happy customers we have.We are also concentrating on creating a larger ecosystem of partners that can take us into multiple segments. We have five national integration partners. We're looking at an extended channel of another 75 partners.

Wilson: We did more revenue in the first six months of this year than we did during the whole of last year. And we want to double that in the next six months.

Are they all signed up?

Talukdar: Most of them. We started the process two months ago. The numbers I'm talking about is what we're aiming to have by the end of the quarter (December 2009). Starting this ecosystem has been one of our top priorities in the last few months.

What are the current challenges?

Talukdar: I think we have a really rich portfolio of products and solutions. The number one challenge is to package them and take them to market and create widespread awareness. It's an execution issue at our end. We really need to go out and propagate what we have. The challenge is that people have just about heard of Fujitsu and have not been exposed to the range of products and solutions.

And your challenges with the channel?

Talukdar: Channel partners are saying that they are glad that they can partner with Fujitsu but there is a role that they expect us to play in terms of creating awareness and making systems available -- demonstrating and showcasing our solutions. So one of the things we've decided to do is to build a solution center in Bangalore, which will display a subset of our solutions. This will create a chance for our customers and partners to showcase Fujitsu's capabilities to our clients.

Why should partners or clients switch to Fujitsu?

Talukdar: The reality is that channel partners and customers are looking for alternatives. There is in some respect a lack of choice. Given the range of products we have, people believe that we can be a very viable alternative to some of the current players.