If it walks like a telco and talks like a telco, you may be forgiven for thinking that it is a telco. But that’s not quite the case for Fujitsu Telecommunications (Ftel) the telecommunications products arm of the Japanese IT giant. I met up the other day with Andy Stevenson, CEO of Ftel Europe, which is now being folded into Fujitsu UK as its Network Soultions Division (NSD), for which Stevenson is also MD.
As we noted back in April (see Fujitsu and broadband), Fujitsu has a rich history in telecoms in general and with BT in particular, and is still a major supplier to BT as well as being a customer. Indeed, NSD buys a raft of products and services from BT and many other telcos, including AT&T, NTT DoCoMo and Orange, around which it wraps its own services to on-sell to customers.
Fujitsu seems to be using its hybrid telco product/services heritage to useful effect, winning significant new business at pub and restaurant operator Mitchells & Butlers (where they displaced IBM) and at BAA. Stevenson tells me that they have chalked up new contracts worth £100m since establishing NSD in April last year. This is business, he says, that Fujitsu would have previously had to walk away from.
While I was at first nervous about the thought of what appeared to be yet another IT services player moving into the telco space – a venture as prone to mishap as the other way round – this is somewhat different. There are all sorts of challenges ahead, of course, not the least of which is competing directly with its telco partners for network managed services business, increasingly central to both IT services players' and telco players’ propositions. And there’s also the opportunity for plots to be lost as NSD broadens its channels into the SME market and into foreign lands. But if they can pull it off, it kinda makes sense. It’s infrastructure services, when all’s said and done, and that’s just what it says on Fujitsu’s tin.