Powered by Choice

By Chuck Lefebvre, Senior Director, ClearPath Forward Product Management, Unisys

What does it take to capitalize on – and truly benefit from – the wealth of opportunities the world of digital business presents you?

That’s a key question we considered when determining how best to guide the future of the ClearPath Forward® program. And our answer revolved around a singular concept: choice.

As the system of record at the heart of your IT operations, your ClearPath Forward system will play a central role in defining and driving your organization’s strategies for years to come. But, given the numerous routes these strategies could take, we recognize that the flexibility to employ the environment’s proven availability, security, and transaction processing attributes where and how you decide is absolutely paramount.

So, as we move forward, we’ll be focusing on empowering you with more choice than ever before.

It’s Your Call

For the past several years, our strategy centered on readying your organization for the computing demands of tomorrow via the various ClearPath® Software Series deliverables. While the intent behind this decision – giving you the agility to deploy the ClearPath Forward environment on a variety of hardware and hypervisors – remains sound, we realize that not everyone is ready to make this transition.

So instead of following along this software-only path, we’re broadening our approach so it continues to include hardware alongside the Software Series deliverables.

As part of this shift, we’ve begun enhancing the systems that form the core of the ClearPath Forward Libra and Dorado families.

You can see evidence of this in the premium-performance ClearPath Forward Libra 8500 systems we introduced at the start of 2019. And we’re taking it a step further with the introduction of the all-new mid-range ClearPath Forward Libra 4500 systems and high-end ClearPath Forward Libra 6500 systems.

With the availability of these new Libra systems – as well as the comparable Dorado models and
OS 2200 software-based deliverables we’ll be introducing soon – you can choose the exact way you want to utilize the ClearPath Forward environment.

Want to deploy a pre-integrated, hardware-based system in your data center? You can. Or, maybe you want it to reside as software on a compatible hypervisor. That’s also possible.

The choice is yours.

And to help you maximize the value these choices hold, we’ll be there with advice around which option suits your organization best based on its unique business and IT goals.

Our Innovation Workshops and Appraisal Services will play a key role in guiding this decision. By giving you an opportunity to gather stakeholders from across your organization, these engagements help to surface key goals and the steps needed to make them a reality, including where integration and automation will play vital roles. And when you pair free and open collaboration with our expert guidance, you’ll be well positioned to determine how best to utilize the choices available to you.

The Next Choice

As we work to realize our plans to offer comparable hardware and software-based versions of the ClearPath Forward environment, we’re also keeping one eye focused on the future. And to that end, we’re excited to share that plans are underway to have the environment ready for the public cloud by the end of this year.

Although we’re still in the process of evaluating and determining the specifics of this strategy – in terms of the products that will be available in the cloud, the providers, etc. – there are a few important themes we know it will encompass.

The first, and arguably most important, point revolves around how the ClearPath Forward environment will transition to the public cloud. While it’s understandable to assume that a move of this scale brings with it the requirement to migrate your applications to a new operating system, that’s not the case here. Rather, we’ll just be moving all of the tightly integrated components that make up the ClearPath MCP and OS 2200 operating environments to a different location. Simply put, you won’t have to migrate or otherwise rework your ClearPath Forward applications for the public cloud.

But we also recognize that simply changing where your applications execute is not enough. That’s why we’ll be utilizing microservices-enabling middleware to create connections between your ClearPath Forward applications and other cloud-native apps. And as a parallel effort, we’ll also be exploring capabilities that integrate the ClearPath Forward environment with systems of engagement, helping you further capitalize on the wealth of opportunities the public cloud offers.

When you combine this forward-looking strategy with the plans we’re already building toward today, you’re truly empowered to determine where, how, and for what purpose you utilize the ClearPath Forward environment. It’s your choice, and we can’t wait to see what you do with it.