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Unisys turns away from proprietary image

by Jonathan Lambeth

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Unisys is to reveal a major rebranding exercise on 24 September to get away from the proprietary image of its server products and to grow its presence in the enterprise Windows NT market.

The company wants to promote its new cellular multiprocessing (CMP) architecture without the proprietary image that is attached to its Clearpath server range.

Unisys? technology mixes proprietary IBM chips and Intel processors in one box, but is effectively two different architecture linked together.

CMP allows Cmos proprietary and Intel processors to run together on a shared system bus and memory. It will continue to run older proprietary software, SCO Unixware and Windows NT, and can be dynamically partitioned in multiple combinations of processor types.

"Unisys has a real challenge on their hands?the Clearpath image of Cmos older machines doesn't work very well in the new market environment, where it is competing with Sun and Intel vendors," said Charles Burns, vice president at analyst company Giga Information Group.

He noted that the evolution to Clearpath from the old proprietary architecture persuaded existing customers to replace old Unisys hardware. However Unisys did not do so well attracting new customers who want ?open? operating systems.

"Unisys needs to make sure CMP is viewed as compatible with existing enterprise workloads but more importantly for all the new workloads running Windows NT in the enterprise," said Burns.

With the promise of CMP to come, Unisys seems to be convincing more customers to take its architecture - recent Clearpath customers include BT, Halifax, Royal Sun Alliance, Norwich Union, Orange, United Assurance and Virgin Direct.

"We are moving mainframe know-how into the NT world. Right now our customers require all the robustness we can offer on our architecture," said Jeff Gordon, vice president of computer systems at Unisys.

Giga's Burns noted that having very high performance hardware was only a part of the battle - the biggest challenge would be how well Unisys could improve NT's ability to handle enterprise requirements of reliability, security and data integrity. Unisys has made a multimillion pound investment to develop NT's enterprise credibility.

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