Unisys Launches IT Management Service

Eight Critical Forces Shaping Data Center Strategy

While a lot of organizations would like to get out of the business of managing IT themselves, the biggest issue they have with letting someone else do it on their behalf is a loss of control.

Lots of managed service providers would happily manage the IT operations if asked, but most of those service providers have a regimented set of IT processes in place that are designed to keep the number of options available to customers at a minimum to make them applicable across a broad range of organizations. That approach is a critical element of how managed service providers make an actual profit on the delivery of IT services.

Unisys, however, is now making the case that efficiency does not have to come at the expense of control. The company today announced Edge Service Management by Unisys, a suite of managed IT services that Ed Vaccaro, vice president of IT service management for Unisys, says is unlike other managed services in that it allows organizations to maintain control over their individual IT environments.

Rather than forcing all customers into the same multitenant framework in the cloud, Vaccaro says each customer gets its own single-tenant instance of the IT service management software. That approach, says Vaccaro, not only allows customers to customize that environment as they see fit, it also simplifies the compliance issues typically associated with relying on an external provider of IT services.

Edge Service Management by Unisys provides a user interface for service request and catalog management that enables users to view and initiate services based on their role in the organization; a discovery module that creates service maps, automates identification and provides updates to IT infrastructure components; and a service asset and configuration management service.

Most organizations would rather apply their limited IT resources to strategic initiatives. The problem is that the everyday challenges associated with managing IT mean they spend most of their time on tactical issues. But as IT service management becomes more automated, it’s becoming easier for service providers to manage IT on behalf of customers at much lower price points.

What companies must now decide is what relationship the business wants to have with IT. The organization can continue to devote resources to maintaining IT systems or reapply those resources in a way that derives more strategic business value out of those investments.

While many organizations are now wrestling with Windows upgrades alongside the introduction of any number of mobile computing devices, the time may have come to put the management of IT in someone else’s hands. The only difference now is that making the decision to rely on managed IT services doesn’t necessarily imply the loss of control that it once did.