Fujitsu NZ scoops Citrix Innovation Award for earthquake recovery work

Fujitsu New Zealand has walked away with the Citrix Innovation Award for partners this morning, announced at the Summit's final keynote in Anaheim, California.

Fujitsu provided its cloud-based desktop-as-a service solution, GoDaaS, for Statistics New Zealand and the government to get it up and running after the November 2016 earthquakes that crippled IT systems, buildings and brought the city to a halt. After just four days, Statistics New Zealand was up and running again.

Fujitsu has also been working alongside Statistics New Zealand to transform the company from a desk-based workforce to an activity-based workforce, allowing for better mobility and remote working capabilities for its 1200 staff.

This relationship became important during the earthquakes, particularly as the Statistics New Zealand building in Wellington suffered major damage.

"Certainly our building Statistics New Zealand we suffered catastrophic damage, if anybody had been in the building when the quake occurred,  there would have been fatalities," says Christopher Buxton, chief digital officer for Statistics New Zealand.

Statistics New Zealand was also heavily affected by the 2011 Christchurch quakes, which took out disaster recovery and its Christchurch data center.

As a result of that quake, Fujitsu NZ's general manager of sales Mike Bullock says it was the tipping point for the government's move to cloud-based solutions.

In addition, the need for real-time data as opposed to fixed annual data spurred the decision to move to cloud. More mobility allows staff to set up a digital workspace at temporary project offices to support new surveys.

Fujitsu New Zealand implemented GoDaaS, a hybrid cloud solution 100% built on a multi-tenanted Citrix architecture including Citrix Workspace Suite and NetScaler across traditional and virtual environments. Fujitsu separated desktops and data from their laptops for a true cloud environments.

"Without Citrix, GoDaaS wouldn't be possible. Working with Fujitsu to implement Citrix solutions, we've been able to make DaaS operational within hours and days. This has helped us transform how our agency works," says Statistics New Zealand's chief digital officer Christopher Buxton.

Citrix says Fujitsu achieved a seamless user experience, organisational agility and elasticity. Summit attendees also had the opportunity to vote for the winner.

Other finalists included Atea Denmark and US company Envision IT.

The Citrix Partner Innovation Award recognises 'visionary' partners that use Citrix technology to deliver solutions while achieving success, market share growth and competitive momentum.