Fujitsu announces ‘Engineering Cloud’ for manufacturing

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Fujitsu on Wednesday unveiled its “Engineering Cloud” concept, a next-generation manufacturing environment offered in the form of cloud-based services from Fujitsu”s data centers. The Engineering Cloud will support the manufacturing sector with a combination of Fujitsu”s own engineering-support software—CAD and analytic software, as well as parts database software—with a suite of new services to transform the manufacturing process. These will be steadily rolled out beginning in October.

Fujitsu”s Engineering Cloud uses some of the world’s most advanced high-speed image compression technology, known as RVEC, which was developed by Fujitsu Laboratories Limited and successfully commercialized by Fujitsu Advanced Technologies Limited. RVEC makes it possible to efficiently consolidate applications and high-volume data formats, such as design data, on a cloud platform.

The Engineering Cloud will provide customers access to these services anywhere and anytime, without PC environment concerns, and without necessitating any special set-up beforehand. This promises to greatly reduce manufacturing costs and development times.

For customers that have global development and manufacturing operations, the ability to share data without being limited by time or place will help their various locations collaborate more closely. Building on the PLM Solution already provided to its customers in the manufacturing sector, Fujitsu said its new Engineering Cloud is a way to contribute to making more creative development and manufacturing spaces that generate new value.

Engineering-support software, including CAD, analytic software and parts database software, is already widely used in the manufacturing sector. Costs and effort required to set up a proprietary development environment, however, have proved a high hurdle that discourages many potential customers from taking the first step. And with the vast quantities of data that the software needs to handle, customers need to secure advanced computer hardware and other ICT resources, making it even more of a challenge to ensure the smooth sharing of data between locations around the world.

Fujitsu said it is introducing the Engineering Cloud as a way to address these issues, and beginning in October 2011, the company will start to roll out these services.