Fujitsu Japan rebuilt their solution by fully utilizing Azure PaaS! What’s the advantage of “Java on Azure” and what’s appealing about it?

Enhanced accuracy of master data supports wholesales businesses in construction of data infrastructure for promoting DX

Fujitsu Group has set a purpose “Make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation” as their significance in the society, and as the company pursuing this purpose in the Japanese market, Fujitsu Japan was established on October 1, 2020. While offering systems and services mainly targeting Japanese manufacturing and logistics businesses, the company makes proposals to public fields, such as municipalities, medical institutions, and educational organizations by taking advantage of its business knowledges and technological capabilities.

The business environment surrounding Japanese manufacturing and logistics businesses is going through radical changes. Not to mention the impacts of worldwide pandemic, while digitization of businesses as well as customer’s lifestyles are increasingly changing, it is becoming more important for companies to constantly seek for new ways of manufacturing and logistics utilizing digital technology in order to respond to various customer needs.

Fujitsu Japan is also working on innovation and improvement of existing products and services to solve such issues facing companies and support their business expansion. One of such efforts is converting infrastructures used for providing products and services to cloud. Mr. Shinsuke Osuna, Group Manager at e-business Service Management Division says:

“As more customers start using cloud services centered on SaaS, we have worked on conversion of service infrastructures that we provide to customers to cloud. First of all, we built a shared infrastructure on Microsoft Azure (hereafter Azure) where our SaaS services can be built, and then we have been converting our products and services intended for customers engaging in the industrial and retailing businesses to cloud-based ones. As part of such efforts, we converted our master data management (MDM) product “Fujitsu Master Data Service TradeFront M-DeX” (hereafter TradeFront M-DeX) to cloud.” (Mr. Osuna)

Master data management plays a significant role in today’s rapidly changing business environment. Mr. Shin Watanabe, Manager at e-business Service Management Division says:

“In response to the diversified lifestyle of consumers, many retailing businesses are promoting new efforts by making use of Internet such as online supermarket, Online Merges with Offline (OMO), EC, and so on. The more you get new tasks, the more you face items and functions required for products master as well as linkage methods, which often brings issues that cannot be handled with the conventional systems. In fact, many companies haven’t been able to immediately respond to customer needs due to their systems and are missing opportunities for business expansion. By converting TradeFront M-DeX to cloud, we aimed to solve such issues and support customers as they build data infrastructures in the course of promoting digital transformation (DX).” (Mr. Watanabe)

The service infrastructure adopted for TradeFront M-DeX was Azure.

Azure PaaS environment was adopted for the infrastructure providing MDM service “TradeFront M-DeX”

TradeFront M-DeX was designed based on the EDI service “TradeFront/6G”. TradeFront/6G (including its former versions) has been provided for over 30 years, originally by Fujitsu FIP Corporation before it was integrated into Fujitsu Japan Limited. As a service undertaking critical work in retailing businesses, it is equipped with high stability and reliability. For this reason, various requirements including functions, reliability, past results, and costs were taken into consideration to select a service infrastructure for TradeFront M-DeX.

At Fujitsu Japan, we choose right methods for right services we provide, such as the company’s data center, various cloud services provided by Fujitsu, public cloud services provided by overseas vendors, and so on. Mr. Kenta Inoue, 3rd EDI System Department, 2nd Solution Business Division, Business Solution Development Headquarters tells the background of focusing on Azure:

“In order to continually support customer’s business, it is important to be able to promptly and flexibly expand their infrastructure and constantly provide the latest functions. On the other hand, such infrastructures also need to be stable and highly reliable. In response to such needs, Azure has been adopted as a shared infrastructure used by multiple SaaS services of Fujitsu Japan and we have valued that it is a proven cloud service. By adopting Azure as a service provision infrastructure, we will be able to smoothly expand its scale and provide new features in the future. In particular, in industrial and logistics fields, we have set Azure as the most prioritized cloud service and decided to develop various services on Azure.” (Mr. Inoue)

Mr. Yoichi Ohara, Senior Manager at 3rd EDI System Department, 2nd Solution Business Division, Business Solution Development Headquarters, says that Azure was best suited as the infrastructure of TradeFront M-DeX because of its “abundant PaaS services” from an SE’s viewpoint.

“The important thing when promoting DX is to be able to offer business requirements desired by customers immediately and as requested. If we take time for developing applications or procuring infrastructures or use a lifecycle in which hardware is replaced every few years, it is impossible to respond to customer needs looking for new functions and quality improvements on a daily basis. In such cases, various measures would be required to ensure performance even after operation, making it difficult to provide services from customer’s viewpoint. Under such circumstances, Azure enables us to quickly expand services with less operation burden by utilizing abundant PaaS. Although we initially had the idea of converting existing systems to cloud as IaaS, we reconsidered the plan and replaced it with full PaaS because we wanted to utilize the extensive PaaS offered by Azure.” (Mr. Ohara)

Adopted microservice architecture where each PaaS service is linked by API

Use of TradeFront M-DeX also makes it possible to add and update master information accompanying DX promotion, integration of companies and systems, and business linkage, as long as shared rules are set initially. Moreover, we are looking to utilize it as a comprehensive data infrastructure by linking with various services provided by Fujitsu Japan, including “ValueFront”, a cashless solution that manages electronic money and payback points, a store order service “ValueAnswer EOB”, and financial EDI solution “FIRST.”

Mr. Ohara explains about utilization of PaaS in the system configuration of TradeFront M-DeX:

“When we changed the plan from introducing cloud using IaaS to construction from clean slate using PaaS, we made the concept of application architecture through close collaboration with the persons in charge at Microsoft. By reading an enormous number of materials related to Azure, asking questions to the persons in charge, repeating trial and error, we combined services. Since we have used IaaS up to some point, the change of policy also caused much trouble to the persons at Microsoft, but they didn’t wince for a second and showed us solutions that meet our requirements.

The system itself was developed by utilizing open source software (OSS) such as Java and PostgreSQL. The PaaS services used are Azure Web Apps (hereafter Web Apps) for creating web applications, a container application service Azure Container Apps (hereafter Container Apps), serverless Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps (hereafter Logic Apps) for workflows and job services, Azure Data Factory for data linkage, Azure API Management for managing API, a database (DB) service Azure Database for PostgreSQL (hereafter PostgreSQL) and so on.” (Mr. Ohara)

Mr. Shohei Ono at 3rd EDI System Department, 2nd Solution Business Division, Business Solution Development Headquarters continues:

“As the basic architecture, inputs from SaaS shared infrastructure are received by Web Apps and Container Apps at the front first, and then real-time processing and asynchronous processing are divided, with the real-time processing directly processed from Container Apps by the core database, PostgreSQL, and asynchronous processing processed collectively by Logic Apps or Azure Functions and then processed by the front database. Since each PaaS service is a microservice architecture linked by API, it is not only superior in flexibility and scalability, but also equipped with reliability and stability.” (Mr. Ono)

The existence of Container Apps makes the “Java on Azure” efforts quite attractive

They say they also realized the convenience of “Java on Azure” in utilizing PaaS services.

“We changed the web application server for Java to Apache Tomcat since it was determined that Azure would be adopted. By using Apache Tomcat on Web Apps, it became possible to develop services faster and more efficiently than ever, with less management burden such as introduction of middleware, licenses, and version upgrade. Not to mention the convenience of using Java, we feel that Azure supports Java very well, including the surrounding environment for using Java. Also, Microsoft has many experienced people such as Java champion. We were relieved that we would be able to construct a Java system smoothly by using Azure.” (Mr. Ono)

Mr. Ohara also pointed out:

“Container Apps was very useful when we implemented the microservice architecture using Java. Container Apps is a Kubernetes-based app and is suited for the multi-tenant environment, and it has even good performance. The existence of Container Apps makes the Java on Azure efforts quite attractive. With cloud services other than Azure, it is usually possible to make detailed settings on services, but conversely, it can also be said that we need to manage even the details to bring out its performance. With Azure, there is no need for such labor and we can efficiently conduct the whole process from construction through operation.” (Mr. Ohara)

Creation of the TradeFront M-DeX environment was completed in 2022, and production-scale service operation will start from February 2023. As the sales representative of the service, they say they are already feeling the positive effect of cloud as they introduce TradeFront M-DeX to their customers. Ms. Airu Nakano at e-business Service Management Division says:

“Conversion of our services to cloud has made me realize their enhanced convenience upon making proposals. In the past, I used to show materials with screenshots pasted onto them to explain about screens and operations to customers like a picture-card show, but now that it became a service provided on public cloud, I can now directly show them the actual service screens at the customer site to proceed with business discussions. It is easy to expand conversations because they are the screens that users actually see, and customers also say they feel it easier to tell improvement requirements to us. Moreover, in terms of performance as well, as we can receive data processed by customers and carry out PoC on cloud, it is now easier to present performance values. I can engage in business deals based on supporting numbers like “What was taken X minutes before can be done in Y minutes”, and I think we are giving more convincing proposals.” (Ms. Nakano)

Immediately reflecting customer feedback in our services under an agile development system

We are working in a system where improvement requirements from customers are shared among sales and development teams and updated agilely and immediately. Mr. Watanabe says it is now easier to reflect customer feedback by utilizing PaaS.

“Sometimes we propose and show customers our solutions on site, instead of bringing them back to the company and considering afterward. For example, we had a case in which the demonstrator used Logic Apps and made it possible to construct a new logic on site with low or no code at all. This is done when the development team creates the workflow mechanism as backend by using Logic Apps in advance and the demonstrator performs demonstration to the customer and fixes the logic based on the customer feedback on site. This allows for correct understanding of customer needs, making customer-oriented proposals possible. The customer is also impressed by the low-code/no-code mechanism using Logic Apps, which sometimes works in favor of business discussions.” (Mr. Watanabe)

Furthermore, use of PaaS also promotes internal information sharing and collaboration, says Mr. Osuna.

“We now have an environment where we grasp requirements in real time and tell each other ’We can make this happen by combining PaaS.’ The distance between sales team and development team gets closer than before and we feel a heightened sense of unity that we are developing and providing our services together.” (Mr. Osuna)

They say promotion of such collaboration was made possible by PaaS, also from the technical point of view.

“With the conventional Java application environments, it was difficult for users to freely operate data once it had been stored in the database. By adopting an architecture fully using PaaS where multiple services are flexibly combined, it is now possible to use systems in accordance with the individual needs of development and sales. Also, PaaS can promptly implement required measures such as increasing CPU or IOPS. We ourselves were also surprised and it is a big advantage for customers to be able to increase performance from the next day.” (Mr. Ono)

As described above, Fujitsu Japan has realized agile development system ensuring speed, scalability, and flexibility, as well as promotion of collaboration through the system renovation fully using PaaS. Going forward, they aim to link various services by using TradeFront M-DeX as a starting point and build data infrastructure for DX promotion in retailing businesses. Mr. Ohara says, “Through cooperation between Fujitsu Japan and Microsoft, we would like to provide win-win services that are beneficial to everyone including customers.” Microsoft will continue to support Fujitsu Japan in their efforts of promoting cloud and supporting DX for retailing businesses.