In day four of VMworld 2013, theCUBE offered extended coverage with a special interview with Richard McCormack, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Fujitsu about some of the company’s past innovations and a look to the future.

McCormack described the company’s SAP appliance as something that can be delivered into a customer environment alongside its existing infrastructure. Essentially, it can go in as a “sidecar”. It is a fully virtualized appliance with smooth deployment, and VMware played a key part in making that happen. Fujitsu, he stressed, is not just a company producing hardware but also service for the customers.

“We have a lot of customers who ask: ‘Where do we begin?’” he said.

They must do an assessment of their requirements. While some customers may want to do everything themselves, others want something packaged and managed, from client side to data center in an end-to-end offering. They want managed and hosted environments. Even when customers have something as easy as VMware’s offerings at their disposal, they might still want outsourced services.

Watch the interview with McCormack on theCube in its entirety below:

 

Regarding VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure), McCormack said that many businesses now expect something that just works, a ready-made VDI environment that they can pick up and run, linked to a thin client or even a “zero client”. They are embracing the concept of bring your own device (BYOD). For small to medium businesses, there is a huge opportunity in this, as many companies want everything as slim as possible, to have as little actual infrastructure to manage on their own.

Working with HANA has given Fujitsu an opportunity to deploy at massive data centers that need multiple HANA experiences, dealing with servers that have enormous requirements, such as 8 terabytes of RAM. At the same time, McCormack stressed that HANA does not have to cost millions to deploy for medium businesses that need it.

McCormack closed by stating that with over 170,000 employees, Fujitsu is big, deployed all over the world with multiple lab environment for research and development. The company is working on the bleeding edge of innovation. He showed off the company’s latest frontend device, the Fujitsu Stylistic Q702 hybrid tablet. “The bleeding edge is where we want to be. You have to embrace change in your organization,” he said, “It’s key that we listen to our customers.”