Fujitsu to launch PRIMEQUEST

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

PT Fujitsu Systems Indonesia (FSI), the local affiliation of Japanese IT giant Fujitsu Limited, will launch new high-end internet servers, or PRIMEQUESTs, on the Indonesian market in June.

"The products will provide mainframe-like data-centers on a standard open Intel platform," said Masaya Nakahara, who is in charge of marketing Fujitsu products for countries in Southeast Asia.

The mission-critical IA (Intel Architecture) servers, which start at US$200,000 each, were officially unveiled in San Francisco in early April.

Nakahara said the new servers were equipped with Red Hat Linux operating systems and would be available in June. Those that supported Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition and Novell's SuSE Linux would become available in September, he said.

The servers that are intended to replace legacy mainframes were designed to support up to 32 Intel Itanium-2 processors of 1.5 GHz and 1.6 GHz and have up to 512 gigabytes of memory.

Nakahara said that even though sales of the Itanium chip abandoned by IBM had been sagging, Fujitsu was confident in their long-term viability.

"Major vendors such as Microsoft, Red Hat and Oracle are committed to building applications for the Itanium," he said.

President director of FSI, Mikuni Takafumi, said he expected domestic sales of these products to reach upwards of $1 million this year.

"The market for PRIMEQUEST is huge, especially in the telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing sectors," said Takafumi, whose company booked sales of $10 million last year.

Nakahara said that Fujitsu, which had global sales of $44 billion, expected worldwide sales of PRIMEQUEST to reach 10,000 units during the next three years.

He expressed optimism that based on these projections, Fujitsu could increase its share in the high-end server market, dominated by IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun, from 7 percent to 15 percent. (002)