Unisys Announces Availability of ClearPath MCP 12.0 and Webinar Series
Unisys has announced the availability of the ClearPath MCP 12.0 release and is hosting a Webinar Series on the new capabilities in the integrated release of over 125 products. The highlights include technology advances in the areas of service-oriented architecture, real-time infrastructure and security.
According to Unisys, MCP 12.0 provides the benefits of point-and-click SOA enablement; reduces the time, skill level and risk of human error associated with continuous availability of data and applications; increases IT’s ability to satisfy service-level agreements; reduces dependence on ClearPath-specific skills; provides increased network scalability and throughput; enables comprehensive security reporting for administrators, auditors, and regulators; provides additional protection for sensitive data backed up to tape and transferred between computers; and stronger and more flexible user identification and access control.
The “ClearPath MCP 12.0 Software Update” Webinar will be held on MAY 22 at 11 am ET. Additional upcoming Webinars include “Workload Management for ClearPath MCP Update,” “ClearPath ePortal Update” and “Business Continuity Automation for ClearPath MCP Servers.” To register for Webinars on the new products and features in MCP 12.0, go here.
Back
to top
JasperSoft and Unisys Extend Their Alliance Into a Full Reseller Relationship
JasperSoft Corp., a leader in open source business intelligence (BI), and Unisys have extended their alliance, enabling Unisys to become a reseller of JasperSoft's Business Intelligence Suite.
Unisys will add JasperSoft's suite of business intelligence and reporting applications to its enterprise-class open source solutions offerings. As part of the expanded relationship, Unisys will now offer its customers systems integration services, deployment services and technical services for the JasperSoft BI Suite. Unisys will also incorporate JasperSoft-based reporting and analytics into projects that include several JasperSoft prepackaged applications. The reseller agreement represents an expansion of a relationship between the two companies that started several years ago, Brian Gentile, CEO of JasperSoft, told 5 Minute Briefing. “Now Unisys has the ability to resell our software directly," which will give them the benefit of being a "one-stop shop" for customers, Gentile said.
There is increasing demand for the price and performance that open source solutions deliver, Anthony Gold, vice president and general manager, Open Source Business, Unisys, said at the time of the announcement. Unisys has concluded “rigorous performance testing” of the JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite in real-world conditions and proven its enterprise readiness, he added. “We've also deployed JasperSoft's products at several enterprise customers, including federal agencies and global telecommunications providers."
Unisys has been “a real pioneer in open source,” said Gentile. “They have been out there on the early adoption edge," helping customers become more proficient in adopting and using open source, "in a sense exploiting this really important new phenomenon in the enterprise - to everyone's gain.” For JasperSoft as a newer company, it is significant to be validated by a company such as Unisys “that has obviously made a big impression within the open source community,” observed Jose Morales, vice president of business development at JasperSoft. For more on JasperSoft, go here.
Back
to top
UNITE Holds “Hot Topic” Contest for 2008 Conference – Deadline May 15!
UNITE is inviting members to submit a suggestion for a hot topic to be presented at the 2008 Annual Technology Conference "Adapting to a Changing World." The conference will be held October 19-22, at the Orlando Caribe Royale.
The deadline for suggestions for the Hot Topic contest is Thursday, May 15. There are two opportunities to win. The first 20 entrants will receive a UNITE prize. Additionally, three entrants will be randomly drawn at the conclusion of the contest to receive a special prize. Their “Hot Topics” will be presented at the 2008 Conference in October.
Registration is now open for the conference. Registration includes an option to make a non-refundable deposit of $100 by June 13, 2008. Anyone who has made that deposit would qualify for the pre-registration fee as long as payment of the balance is made by October 3, 2008. For more details on registration and the “Hot Topic” contest, go here.
Back
to top
Unisys Collaborates with CIOs to Identify and Solve Top Seven Barriers to IT Modernization
Unisys Corp. announced that as a result of a year-long study with 50 enterprise CIOs, the company has bolstered two key offerings in its Application Services portfolio for organizations seeking to modernize their information technology infrastructures.
“Applications are the places in the IT stack where the infrastructure meets the business strategy,” Cem Tanyel, vice president and general manager, Application Services, Unisys, told 5 Minute Briefing. Applications are assets in implementing strategies, but the old legacy applications are also proving to be a major hurdle and a bottleneck in adapting new strategies and implementing new business initiatives, observed Tanyel. “We have put together a program we are calling Application Services. The purpose of the program is to help our clients - help the marketplace - improve the agility of their applications in support of their changing business needs and implementing new business strategies.”
According to Unisys, in 2007, the company met with CIOs and IT executives from 50 private, public and government institutions. The discussions revealed seven key challenges facing IT executives in getting modernization projects started.
The first is that organizations struggle to find the upfront funds to pay for modernization projects. Additionally, organizations face risks to their business while making changes to core business applications, and also, for many IT executives, there is no clear personal reward for modernization especially when everything is working fine. Additional challenges include time required for modernization projects, too little independent information to help organizations make choices, the fact that more pressing business and IT maintenance issues are always front and center, and concern about making changes that could compromise service and the performance of existing systems.
Despite these barriers, according to Unisys, organizations also recognize the business requirement for upgrading and evolving their IT infrastructure and applications to take advantage of modern technologies such as open source software and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
To help companies get started, Unisys offers Application Portfolio Management (APM) and Knowledge-Based Management (KBM) services. These two services are particularly important because “modernization is a journey,” said Tanyel. These services “essentially help our clients chart out their journey.”
The Unisys APM service helps organizations build a common understanding of their current software assets, including the value of these assets to the organization, areas of risk, and business and technology interdependencies. The KBM service helps organizations expose and identify ways, at a micro level, to transform existing functionality for reuse during modernization projects. The Unisys KBM service is intended to minimize the business risk associated with a complete IT overall by allowing organizations to focus initial efforts on a subset of applications based on internal priorities.
Beyond these two, Unisys also has a broad spectrum of application modernization services, application outsourcing services and services around the implementation of SOA and enterprise architecture initiatives, said Tanyel, explaining that the company felt there was a need to take services it had offered in the past in an ad hoc manner and turn them into “programmatic” services. “We officially kicked them off at the beginning of 2007,” he said, adding, “In 2008 we are in 'version 2.0' of the services,” he said. “We are accelerating their rollout and emphasizing their importance and their benefits.” For more information, go here.
Back
to top
CiRBA Version 4.6 Enables Cross-Platform Virtualization Planning
CiRBA, a leader in data center intelligence software, has released version 4.6 of its virtualization and consolidation analysis software. With Version 4.6, CiRBA improves its workload analysis, enabling organizations to plan and design virtualized infrastructure on any platform, including mainframes, based on workload personalities, risk tolerance, SLAs and performance requirements. The advanced workload modeling can also consider the impact of iSCSI storage and network connectivity on virtualized servers to optimize placements and use of these technologies.
The enhancements in version 4.6 address the demand to do accurate cross-platform analysis as well as analysis of workloads onto large end points, Andrew Hillier, CTO and co-founder for CiRBA, told 5 Minute Briefing. “We see that rising more and more,” he said, observing, for example, that Unisys, Sun and IBM “all have very large x86-based systems - and again, things like the mainframe - where you can get very high stacking ratios - that requires special attention when you are analyzing.”
A key new feature of the release is called personality-based benchmarking, Hillier said. CiRBA Version 4.6 helps teams determine which benchmarks are appropriate for specific workloads and then enables analysis using multiple benchmarks within a single virtual pool, resulting in accurate modeling of combined workloads. CiRBA supports widely used benchmarks including those from Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) and Ideas International.
“If you have an app that is running CPU-intensive workloads - it is number crunching - it might look pretty good on an x86 box and it might look for example terrible on a mainframe,” said Hillier. “We have actually defined a number of workload personality types and we have added benchmarking strategy to allow you to properly analyze each of them.”
Another key concern is “to figure out how high you can stack them safely without incurring too much risk on that end point - and this becomes very important when you are talking about large end points,” said Hillier. “We have added some very interesting analysis features that let you analyze for example transactional workloads separate from batch workloads,” he noted. “When you virtualize, you really have to take into account what the apps need and meet those requirements.”
Additionally, critical applications that must always provide high performance for transaction processing may be analyzed by specifying a very low “peak contention” tolerance, reducing the risk that workloads will compete for resources and performance will be adversely affected. CiRBA provides a variety of workload scoring strategies based on peak or sustained activity to be applied in conjunction with tolerance ratings so that organizations can balance service levels, potential risk, and consolidation ratios.
Particularly in large organizations there are these “fit for purpose” projects being kicked off, “where companies are saying: now that we are virtualizing, let's actually step back and figure out the exact right place for each type of workload to run in our environment,” said Hiller, noting there is an increasing need for cross-platform analysis. “Every workload has kind of best place to be.” For more information, go here.
Back
to top |
