Customers will sign up for the service by first establishing a minimum amount of capacity, for which they pay a set monthly fee. If they require more capacity, due to a spike in traffic for instance, they fill out an online request for additional resources. Unisys charges for the additional capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The offering is a hosted computing service that aims to combine the benefits of the cloud, including virtualization, automation and self-provisioning, and the added ability to quickly add capacity.

The time it takes to add and provision servers varies but will typically be less than two hours, said Sam Gross, vice president of global IT outsourcing solutions for Unisys.

"This is far more efficient than any other private clouds in the industry because we're not requiring you to make this long-term high watermark assessment about the resources you'll need," Gross said.

Often, users of hosted compute offerings will ask for the maximum amount of capacity they think they'll require in order to ensure access. But that could mean they are paying for capacity that is not being used much of the time.