Farhat Ali president and chief executive
officer of Fujitsu America Group.

In times of financial and economic uncertainty, wisdom dictates to some business people that they reduce costs, adopt a conservative posture and ride out the storm. Not so for the Fujitsu Group, the US$53 billion global IT provider. At a time when others are scaling back, Fujitsu is about to complete a new data centre in Port-of-Spain, through its local arm, which was renamed Fujitsu Caribbean (Trinidad) Ltd, under a recent and thorough-going reorganisation in which Fujitsu’s Caribbean business became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Fujitsu America.

On a visit to Trinidad three weeks ago, president and chief executive officer of the newly organised Fujitsu America Group, Farhat Ali, said the company is spending US$5 million to build the data centre, which will cost US$10 million by the time it is fully outfitted. After touring the facility, Ali said he was “very, very, impressed” with the data centre and its design. “It allows us a very, very good place to offer customers the ability to outsource to us.”

Indeed, Ali said Fujitsu already had several local clients committed to using the centre, which is scheduled to be opened in another month or so. It will provide capacity for future growth. He said even companies which had their own data centres would be interested in making use of the Fujitsu facility as a back-up. The Trinidad data centre symbolises Fujitsu’s psychology of growth and expansion despite the unsettled global conditions. “We will not be stupid, we will not make commitments we cannot abide by,” Ali said. However, he said that Fujitsu is “absolutely committed to the region,” and is also making investments in Jamaica. “As of now, we see the Caribbean as an area where we should make investments.”

He said he had already visited Jamaica and was impressed with Fujitsu’s operations in that island and was similarly impressed with T&T, where he detected signs of growth. “We are willing to invest here.” In fact, Ali said Fujitsu was investing in all the countries in which it operates. He said that even in the US where the economy is much worse, Fujitsu is also making significant investments, upgrading a data centre and making several million dollars in new investments at a time when its competitors are cutting back their expenditure. “We have not stopped investment. If anything, we are asking them to speed up so that we can offer capabilities faster. Fujitsu’s goal is to put in more resources, not less.”

We are willing to invest here

He said, “The downturn in the economy is affecting everybody, including our competitors. But we believe that we need to continuously make our investments because this too shall be over and we are going to come out stronger at the other end.” Ali said the global recession was forcing companies to try new things in the quest for greater efficiency. “So our value proposition is, ‘here, sit down with us, we will give you a flexible, creative, quick solution by understanding you and your industry.’” He said this approach was attracting interest, particularly from chief information officers (CIOs) of large companies, who needed to control their costs.

He said the US economy had been in a downturn for much longer than those in the Caribbean and there was a greater level of concern in the US. “In the Caribbean, what I find is that when I talk to our customers, they are feeling the downturn, it is coming but it is still not being felt fully as yet. So the thing is to be prepared. So the dialogue we are having is, ‘Okay, before this thing crashes, how can I position myself vis-a-vis our competition.’ ” He said that in discussions with its clients, the company was not just talking about hardware, because its client base covered a range of entities, including governments. “How can we really help, not only the CIO, but the CIO’s customers, not only the government, but the government’s customers, the real users.”

Ali was born in Pakistan, grew up in Bangladesh and was educated at Princeton University and the Harvard Business School in the US.
After leaving college, he joined Endall Corporation, a Sunnyvale, California, mainframe company which was later acquired by Fujitsu.
Stating that he had spent 29 years with Fujitsu, Ali said he had done practically every job at the company. “I have stayed with Fujitsu for this length of time because of three principles—quality, innovation and caring—the hallmarks of Fujitsu’s philosophy,” he told the BusinessGuardian during an interview at Fujitsu’s local offices, 19-20 Victoria Square West, Port-of-Spain.

Ali elaborated, “caring for our employees, caring for the environment, caring for our customers in terms of supporting them, caring for our families in terms of ensuring we get just reward and caring actually even in terms of how we design the product; with soft edges. So I would say that in my personal philosophy, the word ‘caring’ is very important.” Fujitsu America was created out of a recent reorganisation in which the company consolidated its key business units outside Japan in a bid to expand its offerings and provide clients with a single source for IT products and services. Ali’s visit to Trinidad was the latest of several visits he has made recently to the different countries in the newly created division which includes the US, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, the Caribbean, India, and the Philippines.

Explaining what might seem an odd cobbling together of countries, Ali highlighted one advantage of the unlikely grouping. Saying that outsourcing is very big in the US, he said that sometimes customers want to outsource their business to one of the countries in his Fujitsu America group. Whereas before he might have had to deal with several different regions, he was now able to quickly react to a customer’s needs. “It allows me to very quickly put together the onshore, nearshore and offshore model for our customers,” he said. Ali hastened to add that the reorganisation had nothing to do with the global recession, but was undertaken last April when a new president was appointed at Fujitsu. He said it had everything to do with the company’s global strategy.

“It has all to do with Fujitsu’s globalisation strategy and to provide my intimate customers with an outstanding value proposition to make them successful in their industries.” Ali said that Fujitsu “absolutely believes in its customers and never letting the customer fail, and actually going out of our way to ensure our customer is successful. Pointing out that the company had been in the Caribbean for 63 years, he said it had always been able to provide the Caribbean operations with the ability to leverage its capabilities in the rest of the world in terms of technologies, processes and investments to take advantage of opportunities. He said the company’s reorganisation was intended to make those connections stronger.