Fujitsu Limited and Microsoft Corporation announced a strategic partnership, aimed at driving the expansion of Fijitsu’s Uvance business, which focuses on innovative solutions that both address business challenges as well as solving societal issues.

The new five-year partnership marks a significant expansion of the companies’ existing collaboration, and will involve investment from both companies to co-develop and deploy “sustainability transformation-“ focused cloud solutions across the manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and the public sectors

Takahito Tokita, President and CEO, Fujitsu Limited, said:

“Microsoft’s trusted cloud platform and advanced AI capabilities uniquely position us to accelerate the global development and deployment of innovative offerings that draw on our own technologies like computing and AI, as well as our extensive expertise in several key industries. We look forward to further deepening this relationship to realize true ‘Sustainability Transformation’ in the months and years ahead.”

The companies aim to work together using Fujitsu’s Uvance business and the Microsoft Cloud to help organizations become more sustainable and better address societal challenges while driving business growth. The partnership will focus on the areas of Sustainable Manufacturing, Consumer Experience, Healthy Living, and Trusted Society.

Examples of solutions include helping companies to visualize risks associated with rapid environmental change and building supply chains and recovery efforts to respond to natural disasters, enabling consumer businesses to provide more sustainable and efficient shopping experiences and preventing food loss, and linking electronic medical records in hospitals to secure patient data to improve medical care quality.

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft, said:

“We have an opportunity to help organizations in every industry apply the latest innovations across the cloud and this new generation of AI to accelerate business growth and operate more sustainably. We look forward to deepening our partnership and bringing together the end-to-end power of the Microsoft Cloud with Fujitsu’s industry expertise to help our mutual customers address business and societal challenges.”

To help fast-track the project, Fujitsu and Microsoft have joined forces to implement skilling initiatives for 28,000 Fujitsu employees over the next five years. The training will deliver cloud sales and engineering training and certification in all regions and across all solution areas.