At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi successfully won the confidence of Japan's business fraternity, the country's IT equipment and services major Fujitsu is planning to bring its social applications to India that will boost the government's Digital India drive.
"There are lots of social infrastructure projects in Japan and Fujitsu has heavily invested in some of them. There is the agriculture cloud (application) that enables farmers and people working in that field to monitor what is happening on that ground. It helps farmers in Japan to grow crops much more efficiently," Fujitsu India managing director Andy Stevenson told IANS in an interview.
Fujitsu's "Akisai" cloud app for the food and agricultural industries was launched in Japan in October 2012.
The prime minister in his Independence Day address to the nation Aug 15 envisaged a Rs.1 lakh crore ($16 billion) project to transform the country into a digitally empowered and connected knowledge economy.
"Those are the services we really want to bring to India. I think when Prime Minister Modi is talking about smart cities he is talking about these technologies. Fujitsu would like to get into the smart application areas in India," added Stevenson, who is also the territory leader for the Middle East and India.
He also spoke about a traffic monitoring system that "puts sensors in taxis and other public transport to see how it moves through a city".
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The company in June 2011, introduced its SPATIOWL cloud service in Japan that employs location data gathered from vehicles and a variety of sensors.
Asked whether these projects are done in partnership with the Japanese government, Stevenson said: "Fujitsu believes that partnerships are the key for successfully executing large and comprehensive ICT projects, especially if these projects are in the realm of social infrastructure. We have deep partnerships and long-standing commitments with the Japanese government in several projects."
He said the Japanese government has invested more than 100 billion yen ($952 million) in a K-Computer project to tackle complex problems related to climate change and weather patterns, and to increase the competitiveness of Japan Inc. by providing powerful computational tools to develop breakthroughs in drugs, materials and new technologies.
The $43-billion company is harmonising the strategy for India, where it traditionally was into product businesses and IT services. "In India we were largely doing server and personal computer business. India being also used as a global development centre (GDC). We have a number of GDCs around the world. India is one of the core GDCs," Stevenson said.
"We are trying to bring in holistic capability in the Indian market. On the back of Prime Minister Modi's appointment we can see optimism in the market. We will try and bring the best in Fujitsu to the Indian market," he added.
The major markets for Fujitsu, beside its home country, are Britain, Germany, central Europe and North America and New Zealand.
Stevenson, who took charge in India earlier this year, said: "We are hoping to double the revenues in the Indian market in three years. We will need a significant amount of investment for that."
The company also plans to set up a high-performance computing (HPC) competency centre in India."We are planning an HPC competency centre in India for high-performance computing solutions. It will be headquartered in Bangalore," Stevenson said earlier. The company has 112 clients in the HPC portfolio, which is "growing very significantly", Stevenson said. The company targets 100 percent growth in the HPC segment in India.
The company has 3,000 employees in India to serve its global markets. "In India, we will strengthen sales and pre-sales organisations," he said.
The company is also transforming to become a IT services business in India. "The reality is consulting services can be used as a global delivery centre. We built up core expertise to also service customers on a global footprint. My mission is to create solid foundation of the existing business.
"The existing business is consulting services and we have moved to services and storage. My mission is to give the product business a much more solid foundation, to re-energise the channel partnership and to strengthen our regional operation in India as well," Stevenson said.
(Aparajita Gupta can be contacted at aparajita.g@ians.in)