Unisys rolls out infrastructure transformation services strategy

Unisys Africa will soon roll-out its new strategy for its Infrastructure Transformation Services division.

The strategy hinges on four initiatives:

* Infrastructure advisory services;
* Application infrastructure services;
* Networking;
* Security services.

"We spent last year developing the strategy and now we are rolling it out to the regions," says Paula Palma, managing partner for Infrastructure Transformation Services, GIS EMEA at Unisys, based in the UK. "Our strategy for Africa hinges on the successes the region has enjoyed and aims to build our service offering to clients to ensure their continuing support for Unisys Africa.

"Infrastructure advisory services includes strategy alignment, architecture and implementation, while application infrastructure services involves looking after the Microsoft environment, server migration and mail migration, a growing part of our business," says Palma. "Networking is a complementary offering in our service lines and security is an issue we want to assess for the future in SA. This is security focused on IT governance filtered throughout the layers of an organisation where we can add value in organisational structure and processes."

Palma says the company is aligning itself with partners in this field, such as Microsoft; Dell, already a strong partner; with partners and acquisitions on specific technology sets, such as identity and access management and filtering spam through a partnership with MessageLabs.

"Three primary areas of focus in security are going to be security advisory services, managed security services and identity management," says Palma.

Palma took this message to key local customers, such as Iscor and Ellerines.

Ellerines, one of the most recent to join Unisys Africa`s customer list, has replaced a branch delivery system at 600 branches throughout southern Africa. Based on Dell servers located at a central site, the new system was implemented in a three-month roll-out period. In the process, branch application software was replaced, wireless LANs were deployed and a satellite backbone employed.

"We have a senior presence of expertise in the fields in which we service these clients," says Palma, "and since we are not a single point-of-sales organisation, we have developed a deep understanding of these clients, with a high-level assessment of their requirements cross-mapped against their desires and a solution that delivers immediate cost reductions and flexibility. We are focused on enabling their business strategies, which is a giant leap in educating businesses away from a technical point of view, because at the end of the day the business can only deliver what the IT infrastructure enables it to deliver."