Appliances are a packaged combination of hardware and software, offering a faster and easier deployment compared to buying, installing and configuring the components separately. Unisys believes that IT Appliances will grow in popularity as the computing platforms of choice for specialized applications. They bundle all the necessary hardware and software for handling specialized tasks into pre-configured appliances that enable “plug them in,” “provision your users,” and “off you go” tasks ranging all the way from straight-forward database management, web commerce, and voice mail-type applications to more sophisticated cloud infrastructure, CyberSecurity, and industry-specific applications. In addition, appliances have a key role to play in the spectrum of deployment options for enterprise IT and are rapidly moving upscale from their humble beginnings to strategic information management and analytics and even towards highly-specialized industry applications involving millions of lines of code.

We invite you to read the Unisys point of view white paper on IT Appliances and learn where it can be applied within the enterprise for business advantage.

Today, some of the key market trends occurring within the IT Appliances space include vertical integration of products through mergers and acquisitions, appliances taking on more strategic functions within the enterprise, and the emergence of highly-specialized information appliances. These trends are creating corresponding challenges and opportunities for the enterprise in terms of having to deal with increasingly proprietary technology, having to rethink appliance strategies due to their rapidly changing roles, and applying the real-time processing nature of appliances for greater business insights and overall business agility.

As the complexity of IT infrastructures becomes ever more complex, due to trends such as the consumerization of IT and cloud computing, creating a myriad of deployment options on both the front-end and back-end, IT appliances are fast becoming a strategic choice to help simplify data center environments and speed time-to-market. It is therefore vital to formulate an enterprise-wide appliance strategy that takes into account the rapidly evolving market dynamics and capabilities of today’s appliances and which looks for opportunities to employ them for both simplification of IT operations and additionally for more mission-critical tasks across the business.

By embarking upon an IT appliance strategy today and exploring emerging areas related to cloud computing, advanced CyberSecurity, and even industry-specific applications, organizations will be able to gain a head start on tackling rising data center complexity and information overload while also simplifying their application portfolio for IT staff and end-users alike.

Leveraged in conjunction with an IT strategy that employs additional techniques such as smart computing, forward-looking CIOs can be well on their way to transforming their IT environments while their competition struggles with more unwieldy and traditional techniques to meet rapidly increasing end-user expectations.

At Unisys, we see IT appliances as having a key role to play in the spectrum of deployment options for enterprise IT. We have incorporated leading-edge appliance solutions within our Data Center Transformation and Outsourcing and our Security portfolios to help customers leverage the power and simplicity of appliances in key areas such as cloud infrastructure and CyberSecurity solutions. In addition, through our specialty engines for ClearPath mainframes, you can take advantage of the latest technology to deliver application-specific performance for Java, Message Queuing, Cryptography, web/web services and smartphone integration, all supported by industry-leading security and resilience. We invite you to visit the links to our relevant portfolio solutions:

• Secure Private Cloud
• Unisys Stealth Solution for Network
• ClearPath OS 2200 QProcessor
• ClearPath MCP JProcessor
• ClearPath OS 2200 JProcessor
• ClearPath ePortal for MCP
• ClearPath ePortal for OS 2200