Fujitsu completes realignment, expands Synnex agreement 23 July, 2009 By Chris Talbot

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Buie noted that Fujitsu's businesses were very stovepipe in nature, but with a more vertical focus and a new global viewpoint, the company is sharing a lot more information with its partners and building itself up as a brand.

"With the creation of the new Fujitsu America, we have the chance to bring together the wide variety of partners, be they channel, be they key alliance partners ... and key systems integrators, where we can both work competively in some cases and cooperatively in others, and have them all in one place ... to create more unique, joint solutions and apply those for our partners," Buie said.

Most recently the vice president of global partner sales at Symantec, Buie's expertise comes from working with the channel in a variety of positions for many IT vendors, and part of the reason he joined Fujitsu was because of its channel-centric focus, he said.

Fujitsu is retaining its focus on working with a select number of partners and helping them be successful. With about 1,500 partners in North America, the company isn't looking to change its channel strategy entirely. It is looking for new partners in all seven of its key verticals, though -- financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, public sector, cross-industry and retail.

"We're selectively adding partners who can, in fact, make a big difference to our vertical focus," Buie said.

In a time when many businesses are feeling the pinch, Fujitsu actually grew its channel sales in the healthcare vertical by 20 per cent in 2008 and by 80 per cent in education. That growth is expected to continue in 2009. It also increased its amount of sales through distribution in 2008 by 100 per cent.

Fujitsu is adding a few new partners to its roster, but it's also trying to make its existing partners even more successful than before, he said. With a strategy of not being overly distributed, Buie said the vendor's partners are in a good position to make more margin and have more latitude than with some of Fujitsu's competitors.

The company is also working to expand its enablement and demand generation capabilities in the Fujitsu Accelerator Partner Program.

"We've been looking recently at some very interesting approaches, providing some key partners with pertinent information about our installed base. And we're pushing them to take more responsibility, even inside our target accounts," Buie said.

Fujitsu also just launched the new Primergy TX100 S1 server, which is aimed at the small and medium enterprise (SME) space. Designed to be an affordable, efficient and secure server with good performance, the Primergy TX100 S1 will be distributed by Synnex as part of an expanded distribution agreement.

Up until now, Synnex has distributed Fujitsu's mobility and storage products, but now it will carry the entire catalog.

"They will now take on the entire broad range of our solutions, from mobile, which means the PCs and tablets, to servers and storage. We would not have done that if we had not seen a significant uptick in the market with these key partners," Buie said.

Part of the reason for the expanded distribution agreement was the launch of the Primergy TX100 S1 server.

"We think it's perfect and one of the things that led to our expansions of the reseller agreement was Synnex's observation that it could be a significant winner in the marketplace for them," Buie said.

Customers are looking for an immediate return on their investments, and Fujitsu is trying to provide that with its technology, he said.

"I think you'll see our channel participation and our partners' participation in the total revenue ... increase rather significantly over time. We're placing more and more emphasis on giving them the tools and the capabilities and the flexibility to take more of a responsibility of our hardware revenue," Buie said.