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SEICK: Fujitsu Technology Solutions is the name of a legal entity in Europe but in general we are really Fujitsu.

Have there been any growing pains as you create this new entity?

It's just a legal transition, in that sense; in terms of strategy integration we can really say we are 100% Fujitsu. Fujitsu Technology Solutions is the name of a legal entity here in Europe, but in general we are really Fujitsu and that is important.

Your biggest market in terms of sever-market share in a local region is Japan - are you looking to leverage your experience there with other markets like the Middle East?

Yes, when you look into Europe we even have a bigger market share in Germany than we have in Japan.

When you look into the top four countries in the world, you will see that beside Japan, all the three others are in Europe and the Middle East which is belonging to our Central Europe sales organisation.

With the Middle East operations are you operating through the European or Dubai office?

Middle East and Africa is one of five sales regions of the Central European sales organisation. Central is one big environment and then the sales regions - we call clusters - so the cluster is called MEA and its operated out of South Africa.

This just means that the sales manager lives in South Africa, so if the next one is living in Dubai then it would be [operated out of] Dubai.

: From a research and development point of view, you were saying you now control the x86 resources that are in Japan so does that mean going forward it will all be in Japan?

JPS: In fact, in terms of resources we have two thirds in Germany - or should I say German-controlled. Some of the software development is east-shored, so it's in Russia, but its one third in Japan and what we have already done is define and analyse what are the core competencies from each area, so it is quite clear what kind of advantages the Japanese organisation has and what the technologies are that the German organisation will follow up. This is exactly how we would like to work, or how we will work in the future, we will strengthen the core competencies and bring this together.

We will avoid organisational overlaps and increase efficiency in the core competency and then develop infrastructure partly in Japan and partly in Germany.

Has the economic crisis affected your R&D budget allocation?

Not really. When I look into the real development activities in the research and development budget of course I have some efficiency gains in eliminating overlaps. For those things I have cut the costs, but this doesn't impact the research and development capabilities that I have, so in total the joining of the organisations has now brought me into the situation where I will have much more research and development resources available then I have projects at the moment.

In fact it is really a good situation to be in. In this case I now have some freedom to put resources on development programmes that I wouldn't previously have had the chance to manage and to finance. Now I have the resources and with the efficiency gains that we have I have been able in the last to strengthen our research and development position in this area.

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