Unisys Pushes ServicesUnisys Pushes Services

Companies have invested heavily in their IT environments; now it's time for them to start reaping the benefits. That was the message Unisys chairman, president, and CEO Larry Weinbach delivered Tuesday to customers, business partners, and analysts as the company took the wraps off its biggest strategy launch in years. The strategy centers on "blueprint" consulting services that help customers marry IT capabilities with business processes.

But Unisys won't go it alone. Beyond the consulting services, which it will offer to specific vertical industries, Unisys is partnering with IBM and Microsoft to help its customers build and integrate the applications outlined in the blueprints.

"Companies feel like they've been burned," Weinbach said. They invested in IT, particularly prior to 2000, and now they're wondering what they got for their money. "A blueprint will help make sure IT supports the business vision of a company," he said.

Unisys initially is offering 14 blueprint consulting services for the airline, banking, insurance, government, media, and supply-chain sectors. The airline blueprint includes Airline Core Systems Solutions, a Web-based suite of airline reservations and departure control applications designed to give airlines a better understanding of their customers. For the banking and insurance industries, Unisys offers blueprints related to banking and mortgage, enterprise payments, life insurance and payment, and property and casualty insurance services.

"Blueprinting is a very efficient and effective mode of reinventing your company," Age Miedema, chief operations officer for ING's European insurance operations, said in a pretaped video presentation at the event. What helped ING choose Unisys was the vendor's knowledge of the insurance industry. "Unisys also had the ambition and guts to go with us under a tight deadline," Miedema said.

Despite IBM's acquisition of leading business-process outsourcer PricewaterhouseCoopers, it's is partnering with Unisys as another channel through which to sell its Lotus collaboration, DB2 database, Tivoli management, and Rational development software. Unisys' blueprints also support IBM's WebSphere integration software for companies looking to deploy apps in the Java 2 Enterprise Edition environment.

Microsoft plans to capitalize on Unisys' blueprinting model by offering .Net software to "link business strategy with IT implementation," Sanjay Parthasarathy, corporate VP of Microsoft's platform strategy and partner group, said at the Unisys event. Unisys is expected to offer blueprint customers access to .Net development tools, Microsoft BizTalk Server, and Windows Server. The collaboration between Unisys and Microsoft will also provide customers with access to Team Jupiter Lab, a workshop at Unisys' Redmond Technology Center, where software developers can design and deploy apps using BizTalk Server 2004. This is the foundation for Microsoft's next-generation "Jupiter" E-business software.

Unisys's blueprint services come at a good time, says George Colony, CEO at Forrester Research. Companies spent $60 billion during the tech boom of the late 1990s to inject technology into IT environments without making changes to their organizational structure or business processes. "This wasn't necessarily the fault of business or IT, but rather their lack of coordination," Colony said at Unisys' blueprint launch.

The remedy, Colony said, is for CEOs to make use of the technology they wanted their companies to purchase during the tech boom. "CEOs became cowards regarding technology," Colony said. "Now they have to put their political currency on the table to demand changes in business processes."

Unisys has 15,000 employees worldwide, and about half of them are involved in supporting or delivering Unisys' version of transformation services, Dillman says. Services make up 76% of Unisys' revenue, up from 50% a few years ago. The demand for transformation services is so strong that it's the reason Unisys has had "five great quarters in a row," says Fred Dillman, VP of technology and architecture.

The service offers help to companies dealin with legacy infrsatructures. In the economic downturn, business has moved away from major projects that reengineer legacy systems out of existence. "Organizations can't just rip out legacy systems. If you can attack 10% to 20% of the problem a year, you can reduce this infrastructure cost," Dillman says.

A gradual migration of a legacy system's core functionality to a new system is more likely to have a measurable return on investment than an expensive transformation project, in which the whole application is reengineered at once, says Mark Vanston, an analyst at Meta Group. "Right now, companies are back into cost cutting and risk aversion. If a company saves 10%, it won't be released to the rest of the environment," he says.

In addition to transformations, many companies are simply giving users more access to legacy systems, which in many cases are running efficiently. Legacy Cobol systems "are still useful in terms of transaction rates," Vanston says. "In some cases, these systems are pretty hard to move away from."