Fujitsu America Center of Excellence Uses Oracle VM Templates to Quickly Prototype Oracle-Based Solutions for Customers

Time is money—particularly for customers deciding to make costly investments to improve enterprise IT systems. Before making any purchasing decisions, customers want to see that the proposed hardware and software solutions work exactly as promised—and the quicker the better. Oracle Platinum Partner Fujitsu clearly understands this customer mandate: With its new Fujitsu Center of Excellence, Fujitsu consultants can access a consolidated infrastructure environment based on Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers to rapidly build, prototype, and demonstrate Oracle-based solutions to customers.

Fujitsu, which has been a valued Oracle partner for more than 20 years, provides solutions across a broad spectrum of Oracle applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards applications. They were the first partner to be certified as a Specialized (for service-oriented architecture), and they have obtained Specialized status in Oracle Database, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft PeopleTools, Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Solaris as well. Fujitsu also boasts strong technology capabilities with Oracle Fusion Middleware, and the company is focusing on this niche in 2010–2011 with a new campaign called Upgrade ++++, because many Oracle customers are contemplating upgrading application and middleware stacks in the near future. The Center of Excellence, which opened in April 2010, is an ideal way for Fujitsu to demonstrate its deep Oracle technology knowledge.

With a practice 100 percent dedicated to customers seeking Oracle solutions, Fujitsu had a pressing need to find a better way to make a large number of diverse applications available in a ready-to-run mode for customer demonstrations. Dave Hauer, vice president of Oracle Practice at Fujitsu America, says, “We had disparate environments across multiple geographies that we wanted to standardize. We needed more speed, flexibility, and maintainability. The new Center of Excellence is an environment where we can respond quickly to client needs, especially in a presales process.” He adds, “We can quickly prototype a solution and jumpstart a project, and it also works well just for training. As a hardware, software, and services company, we are among an elite group that can create this type of approach.”

One of the key factors that made the Center of Excellence a success from the start was Fujitsu’s decision to build a virtualized environment based on Oracle VM Templates. These templates are fully preconfigured, preinstalled virtual machines that can be downloaded and installed on an Oracle VM server. An Oracle VM Template may include a single virtual machine with a single Oracle product such as a single-instance database or Oracle WebLogic server, or it can involve multiple virtual machines with multiple Oracle products. This facilitates the rapid deployment of even the most-complex composite applications. Hauer says, “We’ve used Oracle VM Templates to deploy PeopleSoft 9.0 and Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.1 in demo instances.” He adds, “This would normally take up to a few weeks. With Oracle VM Templates, we were able to deploy all the demo applications in a couple of days. It lets us really jump into a project and physically look at applications more quickly than we could in the past.”

Using Oracle VM technology in the demonstration system is a boon for customers interested in virtualizing their environments. Hauer says, “With the system, we can give customers an idea of how they can consolidate their environment and move to Oracle RAC, and then eventually virtualize their environment using Oracle VM. And with all the templates and all the different applications running, customers can see it for themselves.”

Not only is the Center of Excellence helping Fujitsu conduct quicker and less-costly application demonstrations that are helping boost revenue for hardware, software, and services, it is serving as an ideal platform for Fujitsu to give more exposure to Fujitsu/Oracle middleware integration technologies. Hauer says, “Moving toward 2011 as people get ready for Oracle Fusion, we are seeing some preparation by clients regarding their middleware stack. There’s work going on, especially in SOA.” He adds, “Additionally, as part of Fujitsu’s value proposition in being a hardware company, we have a lot of the infrastructure, including the Fujitsu PRIMERGY servers and ETERNUS storage, and the software to be able to offer our customers infrastructure and platform as a service. Some of the middleware will play strongly there.”

Currently, Fujitsu has 200 active clients with Oracle projects around the globe. Hauer concludes, “With our new Center of Excellence, we’ve created the physical lab in one place that allows us to more easily leverage the optimal industry knowledge we have to create the best Oracle solutions for our customers.”
 

Fujitsu and ETERNUS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fujitsu Limited in the United States and other countries. PRIMERGY is a trademark or registered trademark of Fujitsu Technology Solutions in the United States and other countries.