Outpaced and outmaneuvered by nimbler rivals,  many of the traditional data center vendors pursuing a slice of the burgeoning public cloud market have found themselves with no other choice but to try and leverage their sheer size – and correspondingly big budgets – to catch up with the race to zero. The latest  such slow-moving giant to throw its hat into the ring is Fujitsu.

The Japanese hardware and services juggernaut has revealed plans to spend some 200 billion yen, or roughly $2 billion, on cloud computing over the next two years with the goal of achieving $3.5 billion in related revenues by 2016. The move makes it the first international vendor join in on the series of nine-figure investments that have been rocking the infrastructure-as-a-service space for the last few months.

Taking a page out of the competition’s book

The multi-billion dollar cloud spending spree traces its start back to January when IBM committed $1.2 billion to building another 15 cloud data centers around the globe for a total of 40 by the end of the year. But while certainly notable the move hardly came as a shock to followers of the company in view of its long history of funneling similarly large sums into areas of strategic interest, from Linux through flash storage to, most recently, Watson.

Much more unexpected was Cisco following up the investment a couple months later with its own billion-dollar pledge to set up an even larger network of partner-powered clouds within two years. At that point, the dominos started falling faster, with Hewlett-Packard becoming the third vendor to jump on the bandwagon in early May on the occasion of its annual Discover conference. The summit  saw the launch of Helion, a hybrid computing portfolio based on OpenStack that allocated – you guessed  it – a billion dollars for fueling growth. After that, however, things came to a halt for a full four months until Fujitsu entered the fray last week.

Upping the ante

The Tokyo giant apparently hopes to offset its late entry into the already delayed push by the industry’s old guard to take on Amazon in its home turf by doubling the stakes. But while significant, that extra billion won’t be enough on its on its own to level the playing field against the cloud’s other top spends, which have funneled much larger amounts into their roadmaps over the years and arguably have a better base than Fujitsu to grow from as a result.

Yet although it’s playing from a disadvantage, the company is not exactly starting from scratch either. Fujitsu boasts a service portfolio spanning the entire cloud stack, from infrastructure- all the way up to software-as-a-service, and claims to have launched six new data centers since the beginning of 2013, including in the US and UK. It also upgraded its existing facilities in Australia, China and Finland.

The capital set aside as part of its latest cloud push will be used to further accelerate that expansion and open two new managed private cloud centers in the East and West Coast, Fujitsu said,  plus another six in locations throughout Asia and Europe. Additionally, the company plans to expand three of its existing facilities, roll out a new version of its Service Desk offering in the summer and make its management hosting platform available in more countries.

photo credit: Martin Gommel via photopin cc