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Unisys Moving Corporate Headquarters to Philadelphia
Unisys
announced that it will be relocating its corporate
headquarters from Blue Bell, PA, to the city of Philadelphia.
The company has signed a lease for 90,000 square feet
of office space to establish its corporate headquarters
at Two Liberty Place. About 225 executive and
corporate client-facing staff will relocate to the
new location beginning in January 2009. The
new headquarters location in Philadelphia will include
a state-of-the-art client center for innovation, showcasing
the company’s capabilities and solutions to
clients and prospects.
Unisys said the move is designed to help the company
enhance its image with clients and prospects, open
opportunities for employees, and attract talent, while
also allowing Unisys to reduce real estate expense.
"Moving our headquarters to Philadelphia will
enable us to better showcase Unisys as a strong and
innovative brand to clients and prospects not just
in the city but also around the world," said
Joe McGrath, president and CEO of Unisys, in making
the announcement. "It will enhance professional
opportunities for our employees and make it easier
for us to recruit the best and brightest among the
city’s students and working professionals and
it will make it easier for our clients and prospects
to get to us. Importantly, the move will also
allow us to reduce our real estate costs, as part
of our overall program to streamline our facility
expenses worldwide. This is a win-win situation
for our company and the city."
Unisys
has a total of approximately 2,400 employees overall
in the Delaware Valley. About 775 Unisys employees
work out of the company’s current headquarters
facility in Blue Bell. For those Blue Bell-based
employees who will not be relocating to the new headquarters,
Unisys said it is considering several alternatives
in suburban Philadelphia. For
more information, go here.
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Unisys Opens Data Center with Innovative
"Green" Design
Unisys
Corp. has announced that it has completed construction
of an expansion to its data center in Eagan, MN, creating
an environmentally advanced outsourcing services facility.
"Looking at energy efficiency and virtualization
as well as design of efficiency of the infrastructure
supporting computers is definitely something that
Unisys wants to do and carry forward, not just in
new facilities, but with existing facilities,"
Victoria Bond, data center director, Unisys, told
5 minute Briefing. Observing that power consumption
in data centers overall doubled between the year 2000
and 2006 and it is expected to double again by 2011,
Bond observed that if it keeps growing at that rate
and no one pays attention, it will lead to power gridlock.
"It is definitely something you want to pay
attention to and then also, it is also more competitive
- more cost-efficient - if you don't use as much power,"
Bond observed.
This
data center’s development plan and sustainability
features are intended to enhance service delivery
for clients and emphasize protecting and enhancing
the local environment and the surrounding community.
This expansion is designed to accommodate Unisys customers
in public sector, financial services, transportation
and other markets Unisys serves. Work on the environmentally
advanced data center began in May 2007, with extensive
facility renovations. During the construction, Unisys
recycled more than 150,000 pounds of building materials,
including carpeting, ceiling tiles, conduit and electrical
wire.
Unisys
said it has integrated innovative, sustainable design
elements into the building’s interior, including
a 30-inch raised floor that enables air flow around
server computers to simplify maintenance and maximize
cooling efficiency. Unisys also installed an energy-efficient
glycol air conditioning system, which improves cooling
efficiency by 44 percent over levels normally found
in data centers. Other energy-saving equipment includes
fluorescent lamps and ballasts, variable-speed fan
systems and lower-emitting emergency generators. In
addition, a sophisticated monitoring and control system
allows power usage to be continually balanced with
fluctuating heating and cooling requirements. Unisys
service personnel can check the system and make adjustments
either locally or remotely in real time – from
any Unisys outsourcing center in the world, if necessary.
These
improvements complement the virtualized server environment
that Unisys provides in the center. By using virtualization,
the Unisys servers at the Eagan center reduce carbon
emissions by 67 percent compared to computers dedicated
to a single application at a customer site.
"Going
forward we are going to pay a lot of attention to
metrics, and capturing a baseline and also trying
to understand overall data center efficiency,"
said Bond. Throughout the country and particularly
in academic circles and the EPA, there is attention
being focused on data center efficiency with regard
to the total power used by the computer equipment
versus the total power consumed by the facility, she
noted. "Any side of that equation increases
your efficiency, meaning that if you can virtualize,
then you are consuming less power for more computing
capacity - or if you do something that allows you
to cool that same amount of computer capability more
efficiently, you are also being more efficient and
using less power."
In
addition to incorporating environmentally friendly
construction processes, Unisys launched a number of
"green" land-based initiatives outside
the facility, including a 3.5-acre oak savanna restoration,
which incorporates the removal of buckthorn, an invasive,
non-native plant species that overwhelms and kills
native plant life. This also enhances security for
the facility by improving views and reducing the risk
of brush fire. Working with the City of Eagan, Unisys
has restored acreage next to the data center to natural
prairie containing wild grasses and flowers. For more
information, go to the Unisys
site.
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Special Report - Seven Trends Shaping the
Data Center of 2008
The
coming year promises to be a year of "more"
in the enterprise IT management world, as end-users
and vendors alike seek to better integrate solutions
that have greater impact on the business. Here, a
look at the top seven trends to watch in 2008.
1
- More server and storage virtualization. Virtualization
is hot for a number of reasons, and extends across
a number of parts of the enterprise. Virtualization
will also be increasingly used to manage the storage
piece of the enterprise, which is growing out of control
across most enterprises.
2
- More SOA. Many organizations will be employing SOA
as an integration strategy. As organizations seek
to use SOA to increase business value by integrating
heterogeneous data sources, there will be increased
expectations around integration, both within and across
firewalls.
3
- More mashups and Web 2.0. Mashup technology will
grow as the choice for building out composite applications,
and will include various third-party resources and
social computing tools while maintaining their enterprise-focus.
With the support of the IT department, companies will
begin to treat mashup components as a corporate asset.
4
- More software as a service. There will be growing
acceptance of software as a service, delivered both
from traditional enterprise software vendors and from
new start-ups, driven by the lower cost of ownership,
ease of use, and rapid implementation available over
other on-premise options. However, organizations will
need to ensure that the on-demand service will grow
with them as their business expands.
5 - More IT governance. IT governance has typically
been limited to policies and enforcement, but the
emphasis will broaden over the coming year, shaping
IT infrastructures. According to one industry expert,
the ability to monitor and track the integrity of
data over time is evolving into data governance, and
once these policies are integrated into applications
and data-driven systems, companies will gain benefits
of data governance on a daily basis, as business processes
can be enforced at the data level.
6
- More vendor consolidation. Last year saw a number
of acquisitions and mergers among prominent vendors,
including IBM's announced acquisition of Cognos, SAP's
acquisition of Business Objects and Oracle's acquisition
of Hyperion. Expect more of the same, say industry
watchers.
7
- More "more with less." Managing more
with less is a trend that never goes out of style,
and this will especially be the case in 2008.
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