Fujitsu to Merge North American Units

Fujitsu PC Corp. and Fujitsu Technology Solutions will be merged on Oct. 1 under a plan announced last week. Toshio Morohoshi, president and CEO of the PC unit, will retain those titles at the combined operation.

Larry Fillmer, president and CEO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions, will stay on and continue to run the combined entity's server and managed services business, as well as help define the company's strategic direction, Fujitsu said in a statement, without specifying what Fillmer's title will be after the merger.

The new unit will be part of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Fujitsu IT Holdings, which will oversee a North American operation that will provide consulting services, software and hardware.

In addition to running the merged PC and solutions business, Morohoshi will continue to serve as the COO of Fujitsu IT Holdings. He will report to Kazuto Kojima, who was tapped to take over as CEO of Fujitsu IT Holdings as of July 31.

The parent company of Fujitsu IT Holdings is Fujitsu Ltd., a $38 billion Tokyo-based technology and communications conglomerate. That company, however, has not managed to crack the top five positions in U.S. channel market share for desktops, servers, SANs or NAS for at least the past year.

Like many other system vendors, Fujitsu has been focusing its PC business increasingly on notebooks and currently has laptops based on Intel's Centrino platform and AMD's mobile Athlon processors.

"A lot of their products are being pretty widely adopted," said Joseph Cunningham, general manager of CPI, an Albany, N.Y.-based Fujitsu reseller partner.

Although CPI has not yet been briefed on the details of Fujitsu's streamlining, the plan to merge Fujitsu PC Corp. and Fujitsu Technology Solutions sounds as if it "makes sense" and may work to the benefit of solution providers, Cunningham said.

"Perhaps this [merger] could present us with further opportunities to do more with Fujitsu," he said.

CPI carries notebooks and tablet PCs from both Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard, said Cunningham, noting that Fujitsu's products have been competitive with HP's. "They have very well-built products," he said.