Yesterday, as part of IDEAS ongoing research into the key industry players, I attended the annual Unisys Asia Pacific Analyst day held in Sydney Australia. Unisys in the Asia Pacific region is into the third year of a three year plan to turnaround the operation, based on consolidating activities, getting some focus and beginning to grow profitability. The reports cards were all good and the message is that the company is on track to achieve its goals.
Unisys Asia Pacific (not including Japan) now accounts for around 14% of the revenue for Unisys Corporation overall. And it was reported that services revenues are approaching 95% of the overall revenue take in the region, which is a key indicator that the company has transformed from a product, to a predominantly services, based organization.
Analyst events often include guests, such as customer case studies and Unisys had a session with the CIO of Investec in Australia, Ric Modesto. Investec is a specialist banking group, headquartered in South Africa and also operating in the UK and Australia. Investec has been using Unisys in all three countries for some years with its consolidation activities.
Such sessions have the expected pro hosting vendor messaging, but I like them because they can also reveal interesting and sometimes unexpected perspectives in the often unscripted question and answer part of the presentation. When asked about his experiences with virtualization and issues around software licensing, Mr. Modesto noted that in his opinion the licensing agreements in general don’t successfully address usage of the operating system and subsequent applications in the virtualized delivery on demand space and can be a minefield where one needs to be very careful.
He went on to say that even though you can legitimately deliver an application on demand, the issue of the identity of an end user can sometimes get caught up in the detail of the license agreement. For example the difference between five concurrent and five end users, is a subtlety that can make a big difference.
When asked if that had limited Investec’s virtualization rollout Mr. Modesto commented that it didn’t because the company had taken the approach of licensing everyone to avoid this issue.
What is your view? Is the lack of suitable licensing arrangements, especially in the application on demand space, an impediment for you when considering virtualization in your organization?
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