Fujitsu to Spin Off Mainframe Mission-Critical Software Development, Maintenance Divisions

Objectives of the Corporate Spinoff

As a basic stance of its medium-term strategic plan, Fujitsu is promoting positive structural reforms throughout the company. This drive aims to create an organizational alignment optimized for customer and market requirements and, by promoting a management approach that assigns greater responsibility and authority in order to accelerate decision-making, to enable the provision of business solutions that better meet the sophisticated needs of customers. In conjunction with this approach, Fujitsu has decided to spin off its mainframe mission-critical software development and maintenance divisions.

Since the dawn of the mainframe era, in conjunction with hardware advancements, Fujitsu has leveraged technologies and expertise accumulated over many years to develop and maintain mainframe mission-critical software, which is at the heart of customers' mission-critical systems. There is concern, however, that with the impending retirement of a generation of skilled engineers in Japan - a phenomenon facing both Fujitsu and its customers broadly known as the "year 2007 problem" - the level of skills and expertise in development and maintenance will decline. In light of this situation, in order to provide customers with stable, long-term support primarily in the development and maintenance of mainframe mission-critical software, Fujitsu has decided to establish a new company that will maintain and pass down its skills and expertise in this field.

This new company, Fujitsu Mission Critical Software Limited, will leverage the skills and expertise accumulated by Fujitsu over many years in mainframe systems to provide support in the areas of development and maintenance of mainframe mission-critical software, incident response, operational support for critical infrastructure systems, and services relating to mainframe operations, as well as "transmigration" support for migration of legacy systems to new IT systems. Moreover, by leveraging its know-how in mission-critical systems, the company will also provide services relating to open standard mission-critical systems. Thus it will create an organization offering enhanced support for customers across the entire life cycle of mission-critical systems. -Fujitsu