Unisys Rolls Out Bundles To Help Accelerate Public Sector Adoption Of Cloud, Digital Technologies

Unisys has introduced packaged offerings to help state and local government more rapidly realize benefits from cloud deployments, digital services and hybrid Microsoft Office 365.

The Blue Bell, Pa.-based company, No. 20 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, said it has put its digitally-focused components into packaged solutions to increase focus and decrease complexity for public sector players, according to Shawn Kingsberry, digital government director for Unisys Global Public Sector.

"Focusing on digital accelerators is going to give us further growth in the market," Kingsberry told CRN. "It's important that the government sees and trusts us as a key player."

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Unisys's new offerings leverage service orchestration and safe, Agile methodology to deliver incremental, tangible progress in hours or days rather than weeks or months, Kingsberry said. The streamlined DevOps process decreased defects and increases security, he said.

The entry price point for Unisys's Digital Government Accelerators varies from $200,000 to $10 million, Kingsberry said, based on the number of users and the services being provided. The solution is procured under an as-a-Service model, Kingsberry said, meaning that government entities are allowed to cancel anytime they'd like.

The first package focuses on helping governments more effectively provide permitting, licensing and compliance services by leveraging cloud management platforms to get the customer's base environment up and running quickly, Kingsberry said. The solution automates and integrates workflows to eliminate paperwork burdens and improve staff agencies' productivity, according to the company.

The next package focuses on optimizing digital services and boosting citizen confidence by providing a public dashboard connected to the government's strategic goals and objectives, he said. The offering should provide the public sector with more accurate cost and visibility into the cost and quality of the technology that provides the foundation for secure online services.

"Transparency is key in this," Kingsberry said.

Unisys's rapid cloud with benefit realization package provides government agencies with a single pane of glass to manage both on-premise infrastructure as well as most public cloud systems. The service is oriented around Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google and VMware, according to Kingsberry, with Unisys providing end-to-end management and one support person for every 1,000 systems.

The hybrid Office 365 package is intended for agencies with both public and on-premise workloads, Kingsberry said, allowing them to quickly implement and deliver the productivity software under an operating expense model. It'll also enable the deployment of ancillary tools like the Intune cloud-based management offering and Skype for Business, Kingsberry said.

Unisys plans to put together an analytics-in-a-box offering that pulls together key analytics capabilities from Zoom, Tableau and Hadoop into a single, integrated solution, Kingsberry said. The analytics solution can either be run on-premises by leveraging Unisys's strategic relationship with Dell EMC, Kingsberry said, or in the public cloud with AWS or Azure.

Government agencies using this analytics solution should be up and running within 90 days of the initial proof of concept, according to Kingsberry. Unisys will bring in business analysts and computer scientists during the proof of concept process to address whatever analytics challenges the client has to meet, Kingsberry said.

Unisys plans to create additional Digital Government Accelerators to address emerging challenges in the public sector, Kingsberry said, as well as expand the number of regions served by the current accelerators. All four of the existing digital accelerators are available in the United States, Kingsberry said, but only some of them work today in Latin America and Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

"From our perspective, there is no end," Kingsberry said. "We have to keep being innovative."