WILSON: I’d say we are a new, exciting entrant in the India market. In the past, we have traditionally done work with Japanese organizations, but in the last six months, we have fundamentally changed the focus of what we’re doing in India. For example, we’ve appointed a local Indian CEO [Pallab Talukdar moved into the position in May 2009] and the complete structure around him is now driven by Indians who are known and respected in the market.

We have a couple of priorities. The first is obviously to drive the system integrator channel and make sure that we are aligned to all the key system integrators in the market. We firmly believe that we have a value proposition with some of our technology solutions which allows us to differentiate ourselves in the Indian market. Another is to address our global partners in India. We have a huge footprint of Japanese and German customers we need to focus on. The aim is to grow our share of the wallet with all these customers.

WILSON: Like I said, traditionally India operations have been a reactive delivery vehicle for the Japanese business. The India operations would deliver on whatever sales orders were made on Japan. The go-to market was not as clearly defined or as aggressive as it is currently.

WILSON: There are a number of points. One of them is Fujitsu buying out the Siemens component of the 10-year-old Fujitsu-Siemens deal. That’s allowed Fujitsu to have one global footprint. Taking that forward, the next step was to start putting geographies together in clusters. So we have a Japanese cluster, a continental Europe cluster and an American one. In that development, India became part of continental Europe and that has led to a whole new focus.

WILSON: As I mentioned, we follow a geographical cluster approach. Because of this transnational approach, we don’t have look at countries; we have an organization that can deliver across the globe. When you come down to a cluster level, say the Middle East, Africa and India [Wilson’s areas of responsibility] we define the key and focus countries. But to answer your question, the fact that Kai Flore, our President and CEO, specifically requested that India be included in his patch, shows our seriousness about India. We also have Satoru Hayashi, executive vice chairman of the board, on our executive sponsor board, indicating it goes right up to the top.

WILSON: As a rule we don’t share numbers by country. That said, the criterion is not so much around a revenue growth expectation; it’s about a customer base. We are talking about a value proposition we want to take to our customers. Everyone gets caught up in the traditional IDC or Gartner top lists, but if the choice before me was to sell a complicated solution to a media house or sell another 5000 PCs, I’d much rather chose the former. I want to stress this: our approach is about being a value provider. That’s our DNA; that’s what we represent. This is not a race, this is a journey.

WILSON: At this point in time, we don’t. We are looking at broad-basing our customers. Today, we are focusing on four areas: the media, manufacturing and government. We are also concentrating on creating a larger ecosystem of partners that can take us into multiple segments. According to Pallab, we have five national integration partners and another 25 select partners. We’re also looking at an extended channel of another 75 partners.

We did more revenue in the first six months of this year than we did during the entire time last year and in we want to double that in the next six months.

WILSON: Most of them have signed up since we started the process three months ago. The numbers I’m talking about is what we aim to have by the end of the Q09. Starting this ecosystem has been one of our top priorities in the last few months.

WILSON: I think we have a really rich portfolio of products and solutions. The number one challenge is to package them, take them to market and create widespread awareness. It’s an execution issue at our end. We really need to go out and propagate what we have. The challenge is that people have only about heard of Fujitsu and not been exposed to our range of products and solutions.

WILSON: Channel partners say that they are glad that they can partner with Fujitsu but there is a role that they expect us to play in terms of creating awareness and making systems available- demonstrating and showcasing our solutions. So one of the things we’ve decided to do is to build a solution center in Bangalore, which will display a subset of our solutions. This will create a chance for our customers and partners to show clients Fujitsu’s capabilities.

WILSON: The reality is that channel partners and customers are looking for alternatives. There is in some respect a lack of choice. Given the range of products we have, people believe that we can be a very viable alternative to some of the current players.