At the beginning of March, Dr Joseph Reger, CTO, Fujitsu Siemens Computers told journalists at CeBIT, "this is the last ever press conference under the Fujitsu Siemens Computers name." But then came the teaser. Reger said he couldn't tell us what the new name was due to German law because the name change would not become effective until April 1st.

Today, Kai Flore, CEO and President Fujitsu Siemens Computers told journalists "our new name is Fujitsu Technology Solutions." Flore positioned FTS as helping develop Fujitsu business outside of Japan and to achieve that there will be significant, but unspecified, investment into FTS and especially in the German Research and Development facilities.

Flore said "we have transformed the portfolio to an infrastructure portfolio and want to become an alternative to the US companies. Our goal is to be the European Infrastructure provider and we've already been in this transition for the last 6 months." This is a little strange as according to Reger, in interviews, at CeBIT and at Visit 08 back in November last year, this is a process that has been underway for almost a year not six months.

The big news for a lot of analysts and especially for Germany has been the announcement that R&D services will stay in Germany and even be strengthened. There had been a lot of speculation that given the strength of the R&D facilities in Japan, some of the work would be lost. We now know that won't happen.

What will happen is an extension of the facilities at Paderborn and at Augsburg. However, there are no numbers available yet as to how much investment will be made at each site and if the number of people employed will increase. There were announcements last year over job cuts at some German plants and Flore said nothing to suggest that these would be reversed.

Among the reasons for R&D staying in Europe is that FTS is focused on extending its share of the global Intel Architecture (IA) based server and storage market from 4% in 2008 to over 10% by 2012. Flore believes that this is achievable despite the current financial crisis. Paderborn and Augsburg are the two main research locations for these products. What is less positive is that while all their competitors have been briefing the press on plans for the Intel Nehalem launch this evening, FTS has had no product announcements at all.

The focus on the IA server market comes at a time when FTS is expecting to see its other platforms either shrink or stay static. Flore told his audience that by 2012 FTS expected mainframe revenues to shrink due to the maturity of the market and Unix revenues to stay static. Growth in the IS server and storage market, however, will depend very much on how well FTS will be able to compete with HP, Dell and IBM who are the big three. Flore said "I'm convinced we can do this because we are not only going to be responsible for Europe but also for worldwide IA servers and storage."

Manufacturing will now be consolidated at two main plants. "We have two major locations for manufacturing, Augsburg [Germany] which will be the lead location for Intel servers and Fukushima [Japan] which will support the ASEAN market" said Flore. He went on, "with these two sites and contract manufacturers for other geographies we can make this happen."

Storage is an area where FTS has inherited two big partnerships - EMC and NetApp. Flore told the audience that "we will be bringing all of our storage under the ETERNUS brand name. At the same time we will be strengthening cooperation with our main strategic partners EMC and NetApp."