Fujitsu has today announced a 10-year contract with United Utilities (UU) to design, build and manage the fibre optic network infrastructure connecting UU’s data centre environments. Financial details were not disclosed. United Utilities provides water and sewerage services to approximately seven million people in the North West of England. It had taken the decision to build a new data centre and needed a supplier to provision the connection between this and another existing data centre. We understand this contract replaces an existing deal with Cable & Wireless (of course now part of Vodafone - see Vodafone declines in H1).
Fujitsu is currently in the build and deploy phase – putting dark fibre into the ground. Once this is done, the contract will move into the managed services phase (in the first half of next year) and the network will be managed from one of Fujitsu’s four UK Network Operations Centres. One of UU’s requirements was data centre and security expertise, in addition to the network capabilities. We suspect Fujitsu’s combined capabilities across all of these was a significant factor in its winning the work. Fujitsu also has a good reference point in its deal with pub and restaurant operator, Mitchells & Butlers, where it displaced IBM.
In the recent past, we’ve reported on a couple of other significant contract wins by Fujitsu in the private sector (see Fujitsu inks Balfour Beatty deal and Fujitsu inks hosted service deal with Gatwick). With this latest announcement, it looks like Fujitsu’s run of success in the commercial sectors is continuing.