Focusing on the emerging disruptive IT trends

Q Back in 2009, Unisys announced a ‘new, focused strategy’,

broadly covering security, the data centre and outsourcing.
How important was this decision at the time in terms of
securing the company’s future?
A Unisys went through a period of restructuring to focus on the emerging disruptive IT trends, such as mobility, social computing and Big Data, and the areas of strength where we had proven ability, IP and people able to deliver best in class service. We streamlined our portfolio and focused on where we did our best work, such as security, data centre transformation, application modernisation and management and outsourcing. This helped us to strengthen our cost structure, reduce debt and create a platform for growth.
Q Do you think that there are other, large IT organisations out
there who are finding a similar challenge in terms of what they
do/don’t offer the market?
A I think all large companies in the industry face similar pressures – radical evolution of market requirements resulting from impact of disruptive trends requirement to refine strategy to respond and to focus attention on the areas where you can provide genuine leadership in the market, the fragmentation of large projects and the number of big contracts on offer. There is also a price pressure for everyone in the market currently.
Q Without wishing to labour the point, do you think that it’s
possible for a single IT company to be all things to all people, or
is some kind of focus/specialisation essential?
A I think it’s about facilitating the desired business outcomes using the most appropriate technology, rather than letting technology dictate your approach and limit your operations. As a systems integrator, though we will draw on Unisys IP where appropriate, we work with the very best technology in the market to ensure we deliver solutions that meet or exceed client requirements including service levels and price. . Take our Workspace-as-a-Service proposition as an example. It’s a highly customisable approach to IT provisioning and end-user services and support that can combine many different software and hardware options to deliver increased productivity from the workforce coupled with simplified management of your IT estate.
Q Unisys’ new strategy seems to have been successful and well
received; is that universally the case, or are some customers
still confused as to what the company does and doesn’t offer?
A Our new solutions such as Stealth, Edge Service Management and Forward! are getting recognition from our customers, the market and from the press and analyst community. We’ve also received various award nominations and wins for Stealth, including the TechAmerica Foundation award for cybersecurity in 2014.
Q To clarify, the Unisys offerings are: application services, Cloud
solutions, high-end servers, managed services/outsourcing,
mobility and security?
A Our offerings include outsourcing and managed services; systems integration and consulting services; high-end server technology; cybersecurity; cloud management software, hosted cloud services and maintenance and end user support services.
Q Can you tell us a little bit more about the Unisys application
services?
A Unisys application services are designed to serve the entire life cycle needs of our clients’ applications estate from inception to retirement. We have extensive IP and expertise in modernising and managing applications as a result of our work in UK policing, air cargo and passenger travel and the financial sector. The Unisys Financial Services System (UFSS) now supports more than 40% of the UK Mortgage market.
HOLMES, the policing application developed with the UK police service, supports all UK police forces to manage all major enquiries and also the UK response to any “disasters” around the world potentially involving UK citizens.
Our portfolio of application services spans Mobile Application Services, Advisory Services and Implementation Services. In terms of Unisys mobile applications delivering great results, our Appointment Manager application is used by Barclays and Nationwide to handle millions of in-branch customer appointments in the UK every year.
We also provide Application Managed Services and recently won a managed applications contract with the Spanish air traffic control services provider, Aena Navegación Aérea, to develop, implement and maintain the organisation’s existing applications and design the roadmap for future requirements.

Q Cloud solutions could cover a multitude of sins – what do (and
don’t) you offer in terms of the Cloud?
A We pride ourselves on delivering cloud services that deliver productivity back to our customers through greater service availability and increased performance for applications, storage and ITSM. In the UK we currently offer cloud services to a spectrum of markets, including Law Enforcement, Government and Financial Services. We are seeing significant trend to SaaS models and are now offering application services to a variety of clients.
In terms of our portfolio, we offer Private Cloud Services for flexible computing environments consisting of both virtual and physical servers. These can be hosted at a client site or within our own data centres. We offer secure cloud (to IL3).

We would use our Data Center Planning Design and Implementation Services, as well as our Cloud Advisory Services, to get you there. By strategically combining the people, processes and technology required with the program and project management requirements we can deliver real benefit back to our customers’ businesses.
We also provide CloudBuild Services to successfully integrate new cloud models into the overall business process as well as Enterprise Broker Services and our new Cloud management platform, Choreographer, to automate the management of infrastructure across private, public and hybrid cloud deployments allowing “burst out” capability to likes of Amazon and Azure.
In addition to all those capabilities, security is obviously also a critical factor in terms of moving your data to the cloud and maintaining its integrity in the face of growing, and increasingly complex, threats. This is where our Stealth solutions come into play to encrypt data, segregate networks and cloak data in motion.
Q The focus on high-end servers – is this because Unisys doesn’t
see a profitable future in the commodity server market?
A We focus on high end server technology because it’s our heritage and we’ve delivered some world class engineering in our ClearPath and Forward! product lines. We’ve also won plaudits for a smooth ten-year transition that ensures our ClearPath customers can run our OS 2200 and MCP operating systems, alongside Windows and Linux loads on new Dorado and Libra machines built using Intel’s Xeon processors.

This is great for customers that rely on our operating systems for mission critical performance every hour of every day. Our latest range of Forward! server technologies put mainframe reliability, performance and security for Linux and Windows workloads on to Intel servers using our secure partitioning (s-Par) software. Our partitioning technology creates secure “containers” of dedicated resources for each workload, which eliminates the resource contention that often impairs the performance of standard virtualisation, to enable faster, more predictable performance. The Forward! platform was recently tested against a standard virtualised environment which it outperformed to deliver up to 38 percent better throughput and up to 122 percent faster multiple-workload performance.
Forward! removes the need for organisations to make the decision between the cost efficiency and flexibility of Intel-based platforms, and the security and reliability of Unix systems to run big-data analytics, cloud and other mission-critical applications.
Q How does the Unisys managed services/outsourcing offering
different from the Cloud one?
A It includes a number of additional aspects, such as consultancy, systems integration services, on site and desktop services and end user support. We provide such services in the UK to companies including Dell, Unilever and DeBeers. We offer IL3 security where appropriate to meet client security requirements. Our hosting capability allows clients to manage workloads and to utilise “burst out” capability to Public Cloud domains.
Q As with Cloud, mobility covers a broad area. What does Unisys
offer in this space?
A Our ‘Workspace as a Service’ model provides clients with a range of services, consisting of Mobile Environment Management to simplify enterprise mobility and make businesses, employees and customers more effective by gaining insight and control of their operations and increasing levels of productivity and agility.
We believe that while the proliferating usage of “bring-your-own” devices (BYOD) in the workplace is making employees more mobile and productive, the plethora of different devices and data plans can lead to a costly “BYOD sprawl” of unsupported, unmanaged and untraceable technologies. We help guide businesses in their journey to a future, modern workspace where centralised IT provides mobile and cloud-based solutions to give end-user focused access to corporate IT systems.
Q Similarly, IT security is a big topic. Where’s the Unisys focus in
this market?
A Security is inherent in everything we do now. Protecting sensitive data and IP is critical any business, its customers, and its reputation. With increasing evidence of headline-grabbing breaches mounting—perimeter security defences are crumbling. Unisys Stealth is designed to make networks and their attached controls invisible to unauthorised users and protect data-in-motion across any network.
Put simply, Stealth shapes the network for those who are authorised to access it, and hides it from those who aren’t. Although we have a dedicated security portfolio in Stealth, all of our solutions have a security aspect involved with them. As a Systems Integrator, we have been involved in very exciting Security projects around the world, from Biometrics in for many airports, to
Q How can Unisys help its customers with some of
the current buzz topics, such
as Big Data?
A Unisys has been running Big Data analytics on an as a service basis to the US military and other major corporations for more than ten years. We have one of the most advanced practices in the world and a team of dedicated data scientists on hand to run large workloads for analysis on Unisys datacentres or in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services. In the UK, we have helped deploy and manage solutions which help our Financial Services clients use Big Data analytics to fight financial crime.
Q And the Software-Defined era?
A The software defined era has the opportunity to make customers so much faster and agile, in terms of implementing changes at the rate of which businesses today need to respond to.

Security issues are a current concern around the software-defined model but we believe our Stealth solution can address that exact problem through encryption, segregating networks and creating communities of interest that are dark on a network to anyone trying to hack the system. We can run cloud environments on our Forward! systems, which can be managed by Choreographer and secured by Stealth. All of these innovations have led us to the point where we can support a fully software designed data centre model.
Q How do you position Unisys in the IT landscape right now?
A I think we’re positioned very strongly to support organisations looking to transform their operations to become digital enterprises in line with the disruptive trends we are seeing such as cloud computing, big data, mobility and cybersecurity.
Across our portfolio of services we’ve received some great industry analyst recognition this year in reports including the Forrester Wave on ITSM Implementation Service Providers. Gartner positioned us as a “Leader” in its magic quadrant for End-User Outsourcing Services in North America and as a “Visionary” for the same report in Europe.
Q Is this where the company wants to be, or is there more work
to be done?
A Our plan is to grow, so there is more traction to gain with growth offerings and our core portfolio of products and services.
Q Traditionally, Unisys has been big on government contracts, is
this still the case?
A Yes. Public sector equates to around 40% of our business in Europe and we are currently running some great projects with a diverse mix of customers including the European Commission in Belgium, the UK Home Office and UK policing. Contract awards this year in UK Public Sector include Her Majesty’s Passport Office – Facial Recognition System and our recent HOLMES for UK policing.

The HOLMES contract represents the first procurement of a national policing system completed through the G-Cloud 5 framework contract and the UK Government’s CloudStore.
Q Are there any industries or geographical areas where Unisys
would like to expand its presence?
A Like any business, we’re looking to grow and that means exploring new industries and geographies. Traditionally we focus on public sector, policing financial services, telecommunications and transportation in the UK, but given the challenge industries like the legal profession currently faces, we think there are a lot of learnings that can be taken from our experience in security, mobility and increasing end-user productivity that can be applied here.
Geographically, we would like to expand our scope of work in the Middle East and Africa – a process that has already started, as displayed by our recent partnership with South Africa-based IT services provider Bytes Technology Group. Bytes recently chose Edge Service Management by Unisys to provide IT Service Management services across 41 business divisions within the group and to its major customers. Bytes chose the cloud-based solution to consolidate the management of IT systems and delivery of support services for its 41 business units and a number of its existing managed-services customers across Africa.
Q Over and above what we’ve already discussed, do you see any
other major challenges facing IT end users either now, or in the
next year or so?
A I think that service delivery will be the major challenge as we deal with more mobile workers that expect company tools and applications delivered via the device of their choice. IT will also have to adapt to meet new end user expectations that involve more consumer experiences from their corporate IT support network. Security should also be front of mind for end users as often the human element is the weakest link in the chain. ID management, passwords and personal device security will all have to be second nature as threats become more complex and even more widespread.
Q If so, how can Unisys help end users address these issues?
A In relation to service delivery, Unisys can help by offering customised, highly personalised services and support to address specific customer needs split by the requirements of a role or working group. By devising a new approach that employs data analytics to engineer and deliver personalised, highly effective IT support, and by applying a methodology based on end-user traits – or ‘personas’ – we’re seeing how IT can gain a precise understanding of different support needs across the organisation. On the subject of security, we can protect IT assets and networks but the human element is something we can’t guarantee. What we would advise is that businesses take the lead on best practice and ensure consumers are equipped with the knowledge to make their own personal security decisions – even if it is a simple as changing passwords more regularly.
Q Can you share a couple of brief examples of recent customer
success stories?
A Unisys recently announced a partnership with Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO) to implement its new Facial Recognition System (FRS). The FRS will increase the efficiency and speed of which applications can be processed by analysing facial biometric data and quickly identify issues associated with passport applications.
Unisys was also recently selected to build a more flexible and robust customer relationship management (CRM) solution to support the City of Philadelphia’s “Philly 311” program for responding to citizen requests and inquiries, and proactively reaching out to citizens to improve their quality of life. Based on Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud CRM Platform, the new system will be designed to expand citizens’ access to city services over a diverse range of communication channels including telephone, Internet, mobile phone and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.