The death of Fujitsu Siemens
After reading this i thought about the future of FSC ("Fujitsu Siemens").
I am certain that the FSC joint venture is coming trough an end after
the expiration of Fujitsus and Siemens agreement in 2009.
While Fujitsu makes nice stuff, the Siemens part of the FSC joint venture
only puts his name on it. FSC is a distribution company, a better VAR maybe thats it.
The consumer products like there line of Amilo notebooks and all the other home user
stuff is all bought from ODMs. Nor Fujitsu or Siemens is involved with any technical
design of that products.
The only real product that Siemens brings to the table is there mainframe stuff.
FSC ships BS2000/OSD and VM2000 (an underlaying hypervisor) on three architectures.
The S series is based on mips/risc and the SX series is based on SPARC.
The newest system is the recently announced Intel Xeon (yes X86) based SQ series,
on which FSC ported of BS2000/OSD and VM2000 via Linux-XEN (X2000?).
VM2000 allows FSC to run multiple instances of BS2000/OSD and Linux, or back in the days SINIX,
on there mips based platform. On there SPARC based systems FSC can run BS2000/OSD and Solaris side by side.
On the new systems of the SQ series FCS can run BS2000/OSD (either directly or with a VM2000 layer),
Linux and Windows on one system.
I think its highly doubtful that a solution based on XEN and X86 can deliver mainframe like reliability.
The performance might be slower then SX series, but i would not be surprised if it could beat the S series.
As you can see in this paper from FSC, the SQ series is supposed to replace there SPARC based SX series by 2009.
For Fujitsu this does not make sense since they earn the most from the SPARC based series.
Siemens actions in the recent past, show there concentration on there core business.
This is reflected in the sale of there mobile phone division, followed spinning by of there telecommunications division,
in a joint venture with Nokia called "Nokia Siemens Networks".
To me the remaining question in the case of the mainframe business is if it stays in the company Siemens
or if FSC will spin it of. I don’t see Fujitsu keeping it or another it-company buying it.
Fujitsus future looks quite clear to me. Fujitsu will keep their hardware brands Primergy (X86 server),
Primepower (there own sparc server), "SPARC Enterprise" (servers in joint venture with "Sun Microsystems"),
Primequest (Intel Itanium) and Lifebook (X86 laptops).
The consulting (mostly SAP?) business of FSC will go to either Fujitsu, will be sold to a company like IBM
or FSC will just it spin off.
What does that mean for "Sun Microsystems"? Fujitsu will stay in the SPARC business which is great, since in the price
range and the field of operation of such machines you want to have multiple vendors down to the chiplevel.
