​P&O Ferrymasters Selects Forward! by Unisys Platform to Power Its Mission-Critical Freight Management System

​​European supply chain and logistics leader finds that Forward! platform's fabric architecture and secure partitioning deliver superior performance, better security and lower cost than standard virtualization

London, December 4, 2014 – Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) today announced that P&O Ferrymasters, one of Europe's leading supply chain and logistics providers, has selected the Forward! by Unisys^™ enterprise computing platform for its key mission-critical freight management application.

 

P&O Ferrymasters expects the Forward! platform to enhance performance, security and operating costs for the test and development environment of its Fr8Manager application. The company relies on Fr8Manager for all operational processes and functions, including booking, billing and routing of customers' road, rail and sea shipments throughout Europe.

Fr8Manager now supports approximately 550 internal users, as well as users from customers, partners and national authorities. P&O Ferrymasters decided to implement the Forward! platform rather than a virtualized system for the Fr8Manager application.

"Initially we virtualized our test and development environment to reduce costs and speed up deployment of our internal software projects," said Steve Walters, chief information officer, P&O Ferrymasters. "However, Unisys showed us that the Forward! by Unisys platform can deliver greater performance and better security for our mission-critical freight application than a virtualized system, at even lower cost. We view the Forward! platform as key to realizing our vision of leading the European freight market through innovative use of IT."

The Forward! platform combines industry-standard Intel Xeon processors with Unisys' secure partitioning (s-Par^®) software and high speed interconnect technology in an advanced fabric architecture linking all computing resources and components. The Forward! platform goes beyond traditional virtualization technology by creating a secure partition with dedicated resources for each mission-critical application workload – eliminating the resource contention that often accompanies virtualization and enabling faster, more predictable performance.

In third-party testing conducted earlier this year, the Forward! platform decisively outperformed a virtualized environment using an industry-standard hypervisor, delivering up to 38 percent better throughput and up to 122 percent faster multiple-workload performance.

 

"We are delighted that P&O Ferrymasters has chosen Forward! by Unisys for the company's most mission-critical application," said Nick Fraser, managing director, Unisys UK. "We are confident that our Forward! platform delivers the superior blend of power and predictable performance that P&O Ferrymasters needs to accommodate a steadily escalating volume of application demands and customer requirements."

About P&O Ferrymasters

Through innovation, quality and flexibility, P&O Ferrymasters leads the market in the design, implementation and provision of integrated asset and non-asset based road and intermodal Freight Management solutions for European industries. The organization consists of 600 people, including many multilingual personnel, based at 27 strategic locations, spanning 13 countries across Europe. Our experienced staff offer totally integrated, high quality supply chain solutions tailored to the individual market sectors of our customers. P&O Ferrymasters, part of P&O Ferries, is wholly owned by Dubai World.

About Unisys

Unisys is a global information technology company that solves complex IT challenges at the intersection of modern and mission critical. We work with many of the world's largest companies and government organizations to secure and keep their mission-critical operations running at peak performance; streamline and transform their data centers; enhance support to their end users and constituents; and modernize their enterprise applications. We do this while protecting and building on their legacy IT investments. Our offerings include outsourcing and managed services, systems integration and consulting services, high-end server technology, cybersecurity and cloud management software, and maintenance and support services. Unisys has more than 23,000 employees serving clients around the world. For more information, visit www.unisys.com.

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