FUJITSU – DEMONSTRATING THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE – IN 90 DAYS
By Julian Nettlefold, Editor BATTLESPACE
18 Aug 06. BATTLESPACE Editor visited Fujitsu U.K.’s HQ in Basingstoke to unearth the secrets behind this coy company’s expertise in Defence. We found that Fujitsu has been a long-standing supplier to the U.K. MoD and other defence forces for a long time and has developed a refreshing approach to the manner by which it does business.
Before we go into detail, it is worth understanding that Fujitsu Group is the third largest IT Company in the world, with turnover in excess of $45bn and 156,000 employees, operating in 70 countries. Fujitsu Services, the Company’s European-centred IT services organisation has an annual turnover of £1.74bn (€2.58bn) and 14,500 employees operating, in over 20 countries. The company offers a complete range of IT services to both public and private sectors and specialise in delivering large-scale complex projects.
The scale of Fujitsu’s UK Government business is shown by its impressive customer list built up over a 40 year period. Customers include: the MoD and the Intelligence services, the Home Office, DTI, DVLA, DCA, DWP, National Health Service, HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue.
In Defence Fujitsu is involved in a number of key projects and is a key partner in the EDS-led DII Atlas Project. Fujitsu won the contract for the legacy DII system DII(C)HOTS) in 1991. As part of DII, Fujitsu is mow merging the legacy systems from this contract into DII. DII (C) requires the conversion of 30000 user terminals to be migrated into Atlas. The system was also deployed into Iraq with full Fujitsu support.
Other projects include:
DII
On March 2nd 20505, the EDS-led Atlas consortium was been selected as preferred bidder to supply Increment One of the UK’s Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) requirement. EDS partners in Atlas are Fujitsu Ltd., General Dynamics
Corp., LogicaCMG, and Cogent Defence and Security Networks, a unit of EADS. In addition to working with EDS on the British contract, General Dynamics is also a subcontractor on EDS’s four-year-old, U.S. Navy computer-modernization contract and the Prime Contractor for the U.K.’s BOWMAN system, a key component in the bearer system required for the success of DII.
DII provides computer outsourcing, training and support services for the British MoD under a provisional 2 year £2.3bn Increment One contract of three. The MoD will review the progress of the Atlas consortium’s progress and performance on Increment I in the Second Quarter of 06. Increment I will run from now until 1st Quarter 07, with contract signing expected in late March of this year. Increment II will run from April 07 until March 08 and Increment III from March 08 until 1st Quarter 09.
DII, worth 4bn in total, is the largest outsourcing proposal ever issued by the U.K. MoD. The DII ‘Current’ process has already commenced in a number of areas being some Royal Navy ships and shore installations and the recently-refurbished MoD Main Building, where staff are undergoing training requirements to bring them up to the required EU standard for IT knowledge; this will run into the Convergence Phase where Legacy Systems will be replaced. The assessment phase for Increments I &II has already begun.
Atlas will centrally manage the IT requirements for 135000 MoD personnel and replace more than 2500 workstations 200 major information systems and 5000 known of software applications at 2,000 locations in 24 countries. The MoD spokesman said that a number of existing IT contracts were coming up for renewal this year and many of those have stovepiped systems architecture and software and were technically obsolete.
RASDA
The Replicated Air Support Decision Aid (RASDA) replaced the old databases with Oracle technology with a forms interface in a Windows environment. Naval Shore Telecommunications System (NSTN)
The Royal Navy sends approximately 10,000 m