Unisys Australia has consolidated its Sydney operations in one data center with a keen eye to shoring up the competition in the outsourcing and managed service space.

The Unisys offices were built around the data center in Rhodes in western Sydney. The center houses the Unisys call reception center, the service desk, network command center and the customer service center. It will be the east-coast hub in Australia for the Unisys managed services center, mortgage processing operations, check processing operations and the software research and development lab.

The check processing facility processes on average 1.2 million checks and remittance slips daily for Westpac, St George, Bendigo Bank, Adelaide Bank, Suncorp Metway, American Express and Australia Post.

Brett Roberts, Unisys data center and operational manager, said the facility caters for all possible hardware configurations, and currently has a fleet of Wintel boxes from Dell and Unisys as well as mainframes.

"It is built as a data center with offices on top - it took one year to design, two years to construct and we have our own generators, separate air conditioning for the data center and diesel tank generators underground," Robert said.

"The center was built for 900 watts of power per square unit and currently only runs on 10 percent of total air conditioning power which runs off a separate power supply."

Unisys Australia managing director Mike Ettling said the company is equipping itself for growth in what remains an extremely competitive market. Ettling said this growth will largely be through IT outsourcing (ITO), a practice Ettling believes is the "hidden jewel in the Unisys crown".

"Unisys over the years has been very proactive in marketing our BPO capability, system integration and servers and hardware but the area you will see us become a lot more aggressive is our ITO capability - we are going to tackle that market head-on," Ettling said.