Fujitsu is launching a new cloud offering in North America at the end of May. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service product will be served out of the company's Silicon Valley data center located in Sunnyvale, California.

The company's Global Cloud Platform has been operational in Japan for about two years, Jody Little, VP of cloud portfolio management and marketing for infrastructure services at Fujitsu America, said. Fujitsu has also been bringing the platform online in Australia, Singapore and UK over the past six months.

The North American region will be supported by the Sunnyvale data center only, although the company is considering setting up a disaster-recovery site for cloud platform in Fujitsu's data center in Dallas, Texas, Little said.

The cloud platform is sharing the data center with infrastructure supporting the company's outsourcing business, as well as its internal IT. Only an initial environment has been set up for the infrastructure cloud, but there is room to expand it.

"What we've done with this cloud is sort of stood up the first level of it," Little said. "We have ÔÇô in the Sunnyvale data center ÔÇô enough room to expand quite substantially."

Little said the offering will be competitively priced in comparison to the likes of Amazon's infrastructure cloud, but Fujitsu is mainly targeting the enterprise-cloud market with the IaaS offering. She said the product would be attractive to multinationals because the platform is uniform around the world, which will enable them to standardize their use of it.

The company has plans in place to reach further into the cloud market, starting with a Platform-as-a-Service offering that is currently in the works. "It's been piloted in Germany, so we're talking months not years", before the PaaS offering is launched, Little said.

The US roll-out of the cloud will start with free three-month trials available through the month of August. The IaaS offering includes compute, storage and network capacity customers can provision through a self-service web portal.

Once the trial period is over, the offering will be sold based on a pay-as-you-go model, where customers pay for what they use and receive a bill from Fujitsu at the end of each month.

Fujitsu has more than 85 data centers around the world, five of which are in North America.