Outside of Japan, Fujitsu KILLS the K5 cloud with 'immediate effect'

Fujitsu has taken the K5 platform for a long walk off a short pier, sending the hybrid cloud service to a watery grave - to stretch the metaphor - just a year and a half after its UK launch. K5 came in various flavours: it was sold and deployed as public, private virtual or private hosted service in a data centre operated by …

[Anonymous Coward]

Hands up: who'd heard of it before this article?

Anyone? ... Nope me neither.

Which might go someway to explaining why it hasn't succeeded.

[Alan_Peery]

Re: Hands up: who'd heard of it before this article?

They would have been marketing to Japanese corporates in need of computing in other regions. If the project had been Japanese led that might have worked, but if the projects were initiated outside Japan then you have to have mindshare where they were started. People choose what they've heard of, and heard of being used successfully.

I hadn't heard of it either...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hands up: who'd heard of it before this article?

I suspect it was less "a Japanese cloud solution" and more "will this solution be around in 5 years once AWS/Azure/Google have completed their DC roll out to fully support their ambitions?"

Fujitsu (and Oracle/IBM/SAP/Rackspace/others) are significantly behind in both the infrastructure stakes and the customer experience. Now the big providers have "government" facilities and are winning large government contracts across multiple countries, I think its just a matter of time before the competition is anything but niche. Or you're locked into an under performing outsourcing contract with no easy escape for a few years...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hands up: who'd heard of it before this article?

Some of us have been battering our heads against the corporate insistence that we try to sell it rather than the cloudy thing that the customers actually want. It won't be mourned.

[Sil]

Re: Hands up: who'd heard of it before this article?

https://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=https://dutchitchannel.nl/609610/fujitsu-versnelt-digitale-transformatie-met-nieuwe-cloud-strategie.html

[MyffyW]

Re: Hands up: who'd heard of it before this article?

Heard of it from our Fujitsu peers, never so much as dipped a toe in it, but given what a Horlicks FJS make of our traditional co-lo services I'm not mourning it's passing.

[Ken Moorhouse]

Re: Hands up: who'd heard of it before this article?

Appropriate that its namesake (Gasherbrum 1) is also known as the Hidden Peak.

Hmm, K seems to not be the best prefix for a product/service. K7 was very high-performance, but ultimately led to the demise of Donald Campbell. Then there's K9, which implies dog (slow) performance.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Hands up: who'd heard of it before this article?

> Then there's K9, which implies dog (slow) performance.

Also a loyal companion of Doctor Who & associates.

[Anonymous Coward]

Global corp in recognition of reality shock.

This dead horse has been flogged for years now outside Japan. It was always going to be a hard sell when you also offer every other cloud platform which is better, cheaper and easier to use. Plus, the customer has already heard of it.

This possibly means that the corporate brain cell has been allowed outside Tokyo for a change. Whatever next?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn...

Shocked, surprised moi?

It’s only goal was to prolong the move from Fujitsu on-premise/datacentres to true cloud and it didn’t/couldn’t even do that. Waste of money, resources and reputation.

I did tell them but they called me mad...mental...not loyal to the programme!

We believe in cloud but we will build it using our openstack for you in our datacentres Vs Azure/AWS/GCP - what an absolute waste of time and amazing way to piss off your customers.

Obviously anon because I do not mourn the look on the faces of the openstack fanbois who will now be retraining on Azure asap. Meanwhile I’ve had over 18 months of both AWS and Azure real world experience!

[Register-Reporter]

Rule one....ask your customers if they wanted it or if they think it’s any good

Rule two...listen to your employees (seems like a few disgruntled employees above reveal that never happened)

Rule three....repeat 1 & 2 regularly

[Anonymous Coward]

told you so..

in complete agreement - however it seems that Fujitsu is totally disconnected from the reality - All the FJ entities that did not want to adopt K5 were right - their market did not want it! Will they now be listen to and actually teach the great EMEIA how to do business? I doubt it somehow..

[chezzbian]

Result being....

As if by utter coincidence another 'restructuring' outside Japan rolls out to join the K5 funeral procession. Ho hum.