OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Limited and Microsoft Japan Co., Ltd. today announced that they are strengthening their alliance to promote the implementation of a global communications platform that will transform customers' work styles. This will help Fujitsu's and Microsoft's customers rapidly accelerate their digital transformations.

In Japan, Fujitsu is the leading vendor of communication-systems solutions based on Microsoft products, and has implemented a private-cloud-based global communications platform centered on Microsoft products for its approximate 160,000 employees worldwide. Microsoft Japan provided technical assistance for Fujitsu's internal implementation of this platform. In addition, based on the knowledge and experience gained from this internal implementation, Fujitsu, in collaboration with Microsoft Japan, offers its global communication platform as a solution that helps customers transform their work styles, and is currently supporting 1.2 million people in Japan - more than any other vendor.

In order to promote a further transformation in work styles, Fujitsu, with technical support from Microsoft Japan, is now working to migrate its global communications platform from a private cloud to a public cloud, and to make FUJITSU Digital Business Platform MetaArc, the core of Fujitsu's cloud platform, compatible with Microsoft's integrated collaboration cloud service, Office 365, and its cloud authentication platform, Azure Active Directory Premium (Azure ADP), creating a multi-cloud environment. Fujitsu will begin operations for all of its approximate 160,000 employees around the world in March of 2017.

By using Office 365 in this initiative, Fujitsu will always be able to use the latest communication system services, providing a work style that improves business efficiency and the ability to respond to changes for each business unit. For example, by using the enterprise social networking service Yammer, this new system aims to strengthen ongoing co-creation capability through an improved ability to share knowledge and communicate between business units globally.

By adopting Azure ADP, this system provides single sign-on and multifactor authentication in a multi-cloud environment, including compatibility with over 2,000 cloud services from other companies. Moreover, by combining it with advanced cyber-attack detection functionality using machine learning, as well as Fujitsu's unique biometric authentication capabilities, such as palm vein authentication, this system provides even greater efficiency and even more robust security.

Fujitsu and Microsoft Japan are strengthening their alliance to encourage customers to implement this multi-cloud global communications platform, through such means as joint workshops, using the internal implementation at Fujitsu as a reference.

The two companies aim to expand customer implementations of this global communications platform, which combines Fujitsu MetaArc with Microsoft's Office 365 and Azure ADP, strengthening their alliance to promote implementation of this platform through joint use of the FUJITSU Digital Transformation Center (DTC), Fujitsu's co-creation workshop space aimed at achieving digital transformations, and the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC), where visitors can experience Microsoft's latest technologies. Through these initiatives, the partners aim to make over 200 proposals per year to customers on transforming work styles with ICT, with a focus on customer executives, who will be the internal drivers of work style transformations.

The two companies will jointly start a Digital Transformation Connect Program, in which they carry out a process of proposing and evaluating digital transformations, such as work style transformations.

Microsoft Japan will provide informational briefings at its MTC for customers investigating work style transformations, introducing the latest global technologies, digital transformation case studies, and global management references. Fujitsu will then hold workshops with those customers at its DTC, supporting them in identifying current issues and ways to resolve them, as well as in establishing a management vision for their concept of the future, and then the two companies will work together to propose applications of ICT in the customers' businesses. With the program, Fujitsu and Microsoft Japan will offer consistent digital transformation proposals to the management class representing businesses, accelerating support for Japanese companies' work style transformations.