Fujitsu announced late Friday that it is shipping four middleware products designed to work with Microsoft’s Windows Azure public cloud development platform as well as with Fujitsu’s recently-announced Fujitsu Global Cloud Platform (FGCP/A5), which runs on Windows Azure.
The storage giant announced FGCP/A5, with which it hosts Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure services in Fujitsu datacenters, in June.
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Fujitsu’s new tools aim to provide a line of middleware products that enterprise developers are already familiar with, including working with the Eclipse and Visual Studio IDEs.
“The new line of products delivers runtime environments for Java and Cobol, two application programming languages that are commonly employed in building mission-critical systems, in addition to providing functionality enabling central monitoring between on-premise systems and the Windows Azure Platform,” a Fujitsu statement said.
“This, in turn, enables enterprise customers to expand the use case scenarios for applications and to take the same applications developed for their highly reliable, on-premise mission-critical systems and run them on the Windows Azure Platform,” the company’s statement added.
While the first two products let developers access Java and Cobol runtime environments directly on the Windows Azure Platform, the others provide enterprise capabilities such as the ability to coordinate job scheduling between on-premise environments and Azure, as well as capabilities for migrating existing list applications — for example, PDF list creation applications — to Azure.
“By making this middleware available, Fujitsu will enable customers to more easily develop new applications, or take existing on-premises applications developed using Fujitsu’s market-tested middleware products, and run those applications on the Windows Azure Platform,” Fujitsu said.
Windows Azure is a key component of Microsoft’s public cloud strategy and became commercially available to customers in February 2010. Azure is currently available to customers in some 41 countries.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.