Unisys Corp. this week detailed its Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) initiative, a set of technologies, services and practices intended to improve business and IT alignment. The company"s first technology release under the RTI umbrella is its SafeGuard 30M, which allows the recovery of Microsoft applications running on its Intel-based ES 7000 server in under 30 minutes at disaster recovery sites. The technology also allows for disaster recovery at a site located several thousand miles away from a data center.
In an interview with Computerworld, Leo Daiuto, president of systems and technology at the Blue Bell, Pa.-based company, offered an overview of Unisys" technology direction.
Many enterprise vendors are pushing a technology approach similar to your RTI announcement. How do you distinguish yourself from Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, IBM and some of the other enterprise vendors? In general, there"s no doubt that HP, IBM, ourselves are all playing in the same market. What we think we"re doing to separate ourselves a little bit differently is we"re also going to introduce a new series of products that we believe will allow customers to save time and money in solving some of their problems -- by taking the technology that we have, some from third parties, integrating it and testing it, and really pointing it at a specific IT problem that can be set up and running in a couple of weeks. The other option today is for [the client] to buy the technology from us, maybe buy it from some other people, have some of his people put it together and go off and do what he needs to do, but it should cost him more both in dollars as well as time.
Is this more of an out-of-box, set-it-up yourself approach? Take, for instance, the SafeGuard 30M -- the idea is that it"s a turnkey solution. It"s comprised of hardware, software and services, to a point, to make this a viable product. We will also offer that client services over and above this turnkey solution to meet his customized or specific needs. We"re trying to get this to be more of a high-volume simplified solution to save [the customer] time and money. But it"s turnkey.
How important is SafeGuard to the overall set of products that your intend to release? We"re doing it by availability rather than any other priority. Why do we think [that SafeGuard is] an important one? Everyone has a business continuance need. Some big clients can put some of that in themselves: They can buy technology and do it, or they can just outsource it. But not all customers are ready and willing to do that. We believe that buying a SafeGuard 30M will make it simpler for a client to incorporate business intelligence and disaster recovery without having to get into all nuances of "Should I use this kind of a server software?"
What, then, is your key differentiator from your competitors? We offer everything that they offer as well, and then with these solutions, the differentiator is prepackaged, turnkey, pretested, preintegrated, all of the above. On top of that, [it"s] integrated into our overall 3D-VE [3D Visible Enterprise], which is a whole program where we help the customer establish what their vision is and build the processes for them, as well as the IT infrastructure. This fits right into it.
The RTI initiative seems largely built around Microsoft software and ES-7000 boxes. What are you doing for your ClearPath customers running the MCP operating system? That"s a whole different market and different base. Our primary effort in the ClearPath space is an overall modernization program. That program is helping clients to modernize their technology infrastructure around ClearPath. Now with our most recent introduction of J2EE capability for ClearPath, it actually allows a native J2EE program to run on MCP and OS 2200. With ClearPath, we"re modernizing and extending more and more applications using J2EE.
What"s the future of the MCP operating system? The MCP operating system, as well as the OS 2200, really just becomes core code running a variety of applications out in the industry while allowing and integrating in with the open aspects of Linux as well as Windows. They work concurrently. It really just becomes an OS within an OS. The future is to keep the benefits that we have in the MCP, use that to really differentiate ourselves in the world, while we surround all of that with all the open aspects so that it doesn"t look like it"s locked in, like an old mainframe.
Is there an end-of-life road map looming for MCP? No -- don"t see it at all.
Most large enterprises have very mixed environments and still rely on Unix for their large databases, in particular. How will your message play with them? We agree with that, and in August we introduced the ES 7000 with enterprise Linux. We"re talking to the people who love Unix but they"re on a propriety environment. They would like to move to open Intel environment with Linux. We"re already ready there.
Do you think Linux is ready for anything other than edge-of-network applications? Yes. We already have quite a few. It will take a little more time for customers to get over their fear or to answer themselves that question. And as you start to see one or two very large businesses move to it, then it will help that. That will happen a lot quicker than the acceptance of Windows at the high end. Because once you get a couple of big Unix players to move over, which some are already in the process [of doing], that gives credence.