The Blue Bell, Pennsylvania-based company’s head of enterprise open source, Hans Sparkes, said Unisys is expecting to grow the business to be the same size that its Microsoft business is today in half the time.
We aim to grow the business so that in three years it will be the same as the Microsoft business is today, said Sparkes, noting that the Microsoft business had taken six years to get where it is today.
Unisys launched its Open and Secure Integrated Solutions, Oasis, framework for open source in June 2006, bringing together internal engineering and local services efforts with Linux and JBoss support.
According to Sparkes, it is now poised to ride a new wave of open source adoption as customers look beyond total cost of ownership arguments towards improving innovation.
Using open source technology as a change agent, it’s a great opportunity to step back and see where do you want to be, said Sparkes. People are still looking at it from the cost side but not ‘what does it open up for us’. That’s the great big wave. We’ve got to encourage customers to take that next step.
A focus on innovation, rather than cost, enables users to avoid fruitless debates about the five-year TCO of Microsoft and Linux, said Sparkes, noting that really the movement is from proprietary to open source. What open source does give you that proprietary software can’t is this potential for innovation.
While Unisys is convinced that open source can be a growth driver for its struggling services revenue, the company is not turning its back on Microsoft, and Sparkes said the company sees a good opportunity in the two operations coexisting. We’re building up our skills in this area alongside the Microsoft environment, be believe they’ll co-exist, he said, noting that many open source technologies run on Windows, and very few customers are taking sides.
He said that instead of convincing customers to go 100% open source, Unisys is looking to encourage customers to think more strategically about their use of open source software. Most people have Apache, but it’s not part of their core strategy. What we want to do is make this center stage, he said, noting that the company is offering consulting and advisory services, as well as support services and systems integration.
In recent months the company has added to its existing partnerships with Red Hat, Novell, MySQL, and JBoss to expand the breadth of its open source knowledge, bringing enterprise content management vendor alfresco and systems management player GroundWork Open Source to the mix.
We’re starting to look at the wider community to see which companies we can partner with, said Sparkes. We’re looking for partnerships that will make logical sense in the integration sense. It has to link together into a coherent feel, otherwise it’s just a bag of bits and that doesn’t appeal to customers.
