Unisys Rolls Out New Hybrid Cloud Services Framework

Unisys wants customers to start thinking about their cloud deployments more holistically. The company has rolled out a new framework by which it delivers its cloud services as an integrated part of the entire IT portfolio.

The goal is to keep various cloud efforts from falling into their own silos. In support of that model, Unisys is launching what it calls its CloudBuild Services, aimed at helping IT design, plan and implement cloud services within a complete enterprise environment.

"On-premise infrastructure is going to be maintained for a long period of time. It's not going away, and the concept of how you integrate the cloud and these new models is still one that I don't think all of us cloud people have addressed very well so far," said John Treadway, Unisys' director of cloud solutions and services.

Treadway added that "this is the year of the private cloud" and explained that CIOs should be thinking about the "hybrid enterprise" rather than hybrid clouds. CloudBuild Services are built around a consistent approach to all datacenter types, including internal systems, internal private cloud, hosted private clouds, public clouds and outsourced datacenters.

In Unisys' model, there are three components of the hybrid enterprise: applications, datacenters and management. For apps, that means coming up with a framework that builds flexibility to build and transform software with the option of deploying them to any of the five aforementioned datacenter types. Likewise, it calls for consistent methodologies for different datacenters and, on the management side, a common management environment with controls to manage compliance, risk, governance and costs.

"Unisys cited the need to implement organizational change management to address the people and business process issues that arise with cloud," noted IDC analyst Gard Little in an e-mail. "Other providers may be delivering organizational change management services as well, but Unisys is the only vendor pointing that out to us right now."

The new CloudBuild Services portfolio has three core deliverables: Accelerator, which includes developing a roadmap and discovery report (a process that takes about a week); Plan and Design based on a "concept of operations," which can take anywhere from eight to 12 weeks (sometimes a bit less and other times longer); and Implementation, which includes the integration of infrastructure, automation, service catalog development, operational transformation, datacenter consolidation, service-desk integration, and training and transitional services.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 23, 2011