Prime Strategy: Standardizing User Environment across Multiple Cloud Systems

In this digital age, integrating cloud capabilities is no longer a matter of “when” but “how.” It is the most critical determinant between a business’s success and failure. Whether it is infrastructure, software, applications, services, products, or even an operating system, everything is making its way to the cloud today. But as the adoption of the cloud accelerates, so do the complexities associated with it.

How? Let’s break it down. To make the most of cloud-led business innovation, enterprises no longer want to stick to a single cloud service provider; they want to marry the expertise of Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft, and others to enact and actualize the true definition of digital modernization. This endeavor, however, is easier said than done. The reason being that multi-cloud management necessitates a business’s ability to integrate and operate diverse technology solutions, standards, and service tiers (offered by the different cloud vendors) from a single place. And businesses, more often than not, find themselves in a tough spot dealing with such diverse interfaces and environments of multi-cloud platforms. Hence, they end up limiting their multi-cloud advantages over the minimalism of the single cloud system.

But what if they could bring in the level of simplicity of a single cloud while reaping the benefits of multi-cloud systems?

KUSANAGI, the ultra-fast content management system (CMS) execution environment, offered by Tokyo-based Prime Strategy is making that possible. “KUSANAGI is available across 27 major platforms including Azure, AWS, GCP, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, and IBM Cloud, and in 198 regions across 28 countries,” shares Kengyu Nakamura, CEO of Prime Strategy and developer of KUSANAGI stack. To put simply, KUSANAGI can be used to provide the same standardized server environment across all major cloud services around the world, accelerating the implementation of multi-cloud services and digital transformation for Prime Strategy’s clients.

However, Nakamura notes that for a successful multi-cloud system integration like that, it is very important to be able to manage all technical elements (OS, middleware, and applications) in the servers—a seemingly difficult task for a single-cloud solution provider to do in a multi-cloud environment. “We handle this problem using KUSANAGI Cloud and KUSANAGI’s centralized management system,” states Nakamura. KUSANAGI Cloud not only manages the servers on multiple clouds, but by using strategic AI to analyze and monitor system data via secure shell (SSH) connections, it also reports and provides automated maintenance (hyper-automation). “In a way, this integration of AI with the KUSANAGI Cloud is not just helping businesses modernize or virtualize their IT infrastructure, it is aiding businesses to delegate more work to AI—much like an extension of the manual workforce—to make critical decisions,” shares Hidenori Ishikawa, lead manager of product development at Prime Strategy, highlighting the unique facet of their KUSANAGI offering.

Many Problems, One Solution

KUSANAGI’s benefits are made available to Prime Strategy’s clients via KUSANAGI managed services. General clients (users) can purchase the licenses from the cloud platform or purchase upgraded licenses from KUSANAGI Marketplace, which is operated by Prime Strategy. “Some of the companies even use our KUSANAGI technology to offer their business services to clients. We have partnership contracts with such companies and are working together to expand each other’s business. A win-win situation for all,” shares Chieko Aiahra.

“And since the use of cloud services is improved by this partnership, even cloud operators benefit from the rising adoption of KUSANAGI,” points out Nakamura.

“The bottom line is that we strongly believe in expanding this enterprise open-source software (OSS) ecosystem, KUSANAGI, to Asia and the world so that it can help international brands reap the best of cloud solution marketplaces and platforms.”

In essence, the KUSANAGI stack helps in solving many problems. KUSANAGI reduces opportunity loss and system failures due to heavy access and optimizes server and operational costs by reducing hardware. But more than that, going the extra mile, Prime Strategy also ensures system security by regularly evaluating the latest trends and developments in the industry. All of these advantages of KUSANAGI are further bolstered by another Prime Strategy offering, a high-speed rendering engine “WEXAL Page Speed Technology” (patent-pending), which improves clients’ core web vitals, Google score, and overall user experience. Prime Strategy has numerous instances where the use of WEXAL improved the score of Google PageSpeed Insights from 20- 30 points to 60-70 points, sometimes improving the number of sessions by 130 percent.

The combination of KUSANAGI and WEXAL Page Speed Technology is definitely becoming a boon for businesses to increase browsing rates, webpage views, and leads for generating higher client profits. In addition to the many benefits these solutions are already providing, Prime Strategy is always working closely with its clients to better understand their work process and take the operational efficacy one notch higher.

Under the Hood of KUSANAGI’s Excellence

With a strong customer-centric mindset, Prime Strategy goes above and beyond when it comes to assisting clients in their operations. On one occasion, Bridgestone—a Japanese multinational auto and truck parts producer—realized that their image as a premium racing tire manufacturer was turning many regular customers away from the brand. To break this status quo, Bridgestone partnered with Prime Strategy to create an active and close communication link with motorcyclists. Prime Strategy proposed that they would handle the web system, and a different partner company would produce the content, allowing various companies with respective strengths to contribute to collective success. Once the proposal was approved, Prime Strategy used its KUSANAGI Official Support Service to leverage Bridgestone’s existing content management environment on WordPress and host a new website, Moto-Bridge—the community touchpoint for Bridgestone’s motorcyclists. Needless to say, the website soon became a massive success for Bridgestone. The company started witnessing large traction from retail locations with increased awareness among motorcyclists. At present, Bridgestone is using this website to not only target motorcycle buyers but also reach out to car buyers.

This is but one of the numerous success stories that Prime Strategy has been scripting over the years. Highlighting more of its problem-solving attitude, Prime Strategy’s zeal to brave through the pandemic storm and support its clients to stay afloat amid the ‘new normal’ is also noteworthy. With the COVID-19 pandemic hitting last year, remote working attained massive popularity, and as a consequence, digital transformations across several sectors were accelerated. Prime Strategy was quick to help the global business community regain lost opportunities. “We understand that this trend is expected to stay for some time, so we will continue to develop and offer KUSANAGI to help our clients adapt to the changing business and technological scenarios,” elaborates Nakamura.

Illuminating the Path to the Future

The company envisions developing an enterprise OSS ecosystem to bridge the gap between user expectations and vendor reality in the modern-day IT industry. The firm also aims to accelerate the development and provisions of KUSANAGI and accelerate the evolution of products and services based on KUSANAGI Stack and KUSANAGI Cloud. The KUSANAGI Cloud will soon be available to the public as KUSANAGI Cloud Enterprise Version (tentative name).

Based on this, Prime Strategy is also planning to roll out a management system for the C-suite that integrates multiple business cloud systems and aggregates, analyzes, and visualizes critical business data. At the same time, the company is working toward orchestrating a remote-control technology—similar to Web RPA and AI-driven business process automation—within the management system. Through this offering, information pertaining to different departments such as accounting, sales, projects, and labor can be stored and viewed from a single real-time dashboard called the Management Dashboard. The platform will also house an AI-based recruitment system for automatically sourcing candidate data and shortlisting the most relevant candidates for specific job roles. This would, in turn, accelerate the recruitment process and improve the accuracy of procedures amid such tumultuous times. Moving forward, Prime Strategy aims to develop and provide KUSANAGI managed services with more sophisticated hyper-automation and improve various social issues that are even beyond the web. According to the leadership team of Prime Strategy, the future shines bright for the company, the cloud, and the AI ecosystem as a whole.