In a press conference held here today, Fujitsu Limited Chairman Naoyuki Akikusa and Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer announced a significant expansion of the companies' long-standing global enterprise relationship. The companies entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with respect to their companies' commitment to collaborate in the development of Fujitsu's next-generation Intel® Itanium® Processor Family-based server for Windows Server (TM) 2003 and next-generation Windows Server (code-named "Longhorn" Server), as well as in platform integration, services and mission-critical customer support. This expanded collaboration is designed to help enterprise customers obtain optimal levels of reliability, scalability, performance and value for mission-critical IT environments.

Under the expanded global alliance, Fujitsu and Microsoft will combine Fujitsu's mainframe expertise and systems with Microsoft's latest Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft® .NET software to enable customers to implement flexible, trustworthy enterprise infrastructure and applications that support business objectives and processes in a highly efficient and effective way.