Unisys has launched its sixth Centre of Excellence (CoE), an enterprise technology test centre, in South Africa. This centre, the most capable Unisys currently has to offer world-wide, will draw on key learnings from the other CoEs around the world in conducting proof of concept and viability studies on hardware and software solutions for South African enterprise organisations. Unisys will also utilise the CoE to showcase and then develop applications with its customers, which can ultimately be migrated to the MicrosoftWindows NT environment.
Unisys CoEs are established to undertake a range of activities aimed at optimising the effective use of technology in the enterprise environment, as well as expanding the services and solutions Unisys can offer those customers. Typical activities undertaken in the CoE include developing the methodologies, skills and technologies necessary to provide enterprise-class applications. This includes the focus on achieving mission-critical attributes such as availability, scalability, security, manageability, interoperability and the ability to handle high-volume transaction processing.
The architectural design required to develop solutions for the enterprise environment is often reliant on providing various technological concepts in order to show their viability with regard to the solution. The CoE provides the facilities to bring together all the Unisys partners with their solution offering into one area. This allows vendors, partners and customers to do the critical testing of the suggested architecture.
Ted Wood, Unisys business initiative manager for enterprise solutions explains the CoEs capabilities as a two-pronged approach. "One prong is Unisys technology, able to provide a solid foundation for the fluid, powerful and exciting capabilities of the Microsoft Windows NT enterprise operating platform. The other prong has to do with the development of solutions, and this is where the Unisys alliances come into play."
Unisys believes that its strategic alliances with Microsoft, EMC and Computer Associates, among others, strongly positions the organisation to direct all the required resources into the development of a single solution. This includes the testing and evaluating of software and middleware technologies which includes working with complementary technologies from a range of other software vendors, as well as addressing the processing challenges posed by large hardware complexes.
"The essential enterprise-class attributes of scalability, interoperability, manageability and availability are characteristics previously associated only with mainframe-based critical computing. At Unisys we are capitalising on our years of experience on the mainframe to deliver the same methodology to the Windows NT across the enterprise environment," said Wood.
The Centre of Excellence will be available for current and potential Unisys customers, as well as its partners, from the second week in September. Your specific query will be routed when you dial (011) 233-4589.
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