Case Studies

Unisys Corporation improves agility, embarks on major IT transformation

A worldwide information technology services and solutions company, Unisys provides consulting, systems integration, outsourcing, and infrastructure services, combined with powerful enterprise server technology. The company specializes in helping clients use information to create efficient, secure business operations that allow them to achieve their business goals.

So when it became apparent that the company needed to go beyond enterprise-wide infrastructure consolidation and standardization to achieve true IT and business alignment, they decided to rely on their own resources for the change.

“In today’s world, it’s more important to align IT investments with Unisys growth strategy,” explains Brian Ott, former vice president and chief technology officer, Business Enabling Technology Team (BETT) and now vice president of Global Service Lines for Systems & Technology. “Key to achieving this alignment is creating a ‘sense and respond’ environment to help our organization maximize value and efficiency while supporting business growth and improving agility.” Ott saw the need to evolve to a real-time infrastructure (RTI), one that’s driven by business needs and offers flexibility to change at a moment’s notice.

“To develop our strategic plans and implement RTI solutions, we leveraged Unisys blueprinting methodology,” says Ott. “We conducted workshops that bring together all the stakeholders that have an interest in the requirements, design, implementation, and use of the solutions.”

The resulting RTI blueprint allowed the team to see how corporate strategies, business processes, applications, and infrastructure are linked together in a single, viewable document. What’s more, it allows Unisys to see the impact of changes on processes and technology before they are implemented. The blueprint also defines security strategies and capabilities, as well as how to leverage partner solutions, such as Microsoft and EMC technologies.

Metrics

• Value: Improved average utilization of existing resources from 10% to 50% (or more)
• Cost savings: Reduced overall operational costs by $500M over five years via consolidation into a single data center and standardization on a single server and storage solution, operating environment, and application suite; reduced annual server maintenance costs by more than $324K through virtualization and consolidation
• Cost avoidance: Avoided a projected $750K expenditure for new commodity servers (in 2008 alone) by using virtualization technology
• Agility: Enhanced flexibility to support future growth and new business initiatives by leveraging business blueprinting methodology and virtualization technology

Download Unisys Corporation improves agility, embarks on major IT transformation Here