A Seamless Cloud Experience with AB Suite for ClearPath MCP

By Thangathen Ponnusamy, Global Product Manager – Agile Business Suite and Enterprise Application Environment, Unisys

Hooray! Agile Business Suite (AB Suite®) for ClearPath® MCP is now supported in the Microsoft® Azure® public cloud.

In an industry that’s no stranger to change, we’ve entered a period of rapid evolution driven by unprecedented disruption. It’s a time that sees many clients – and maybe even your organization – accelerating their public cloud journeys.

Meanwhile, your organization continues to rely on core AB Suite for MCP applications that maintain your system-of-record data. And all the while, AB Suite transactional and batch applications keep evolving, reflecting the latest business needs and changing requirements.

AB Suite for MCP on the Azure public cloud represents another significant step in this evolution. And because it joins AB Suite Developer in the cloud, you’re able to take advantage of a seamless cloud experience – one that allows you to host your AB Suite applications in Azure right alongside your other public cloud workloads.

Following this approach, you’ll be able to release new and updated code faster, so you can respond to changing business needs in a timely fashion.

But that’s not all. With a cloud-based, development-to-deployment experience, you’ll be able to:

• Further your organization’s cloud vision: CIOs need to accelerate organizational and technological innovation at a pace that meets employee and customer needs. By running your AB Suite for MCP applications in Azure, you’ll help to uphold “cloud first” directives – while empowering your organization to stay one step ahead of the latest expectations. You’ll make it easier to comply with governance, monitoring, provisioning, and operations standards, too.
  
• Smooth your cloud transition: With AB Suite in Azure, you’ll help your organization transition its historical, on-premise investments to the cloud with ease. And because you can do it with no required code changes, you’ll greatly reduce risk along the way – and empower your projects to achieve the best possible outcomes.
  
• Increase agility: With a model-driven development environment and high-level language, you can minimize the amount of code you must write, test, and maintain, leading to faster, better releases. Setting up and replicating your AB Suite development environment in Azure builds on this inherent strength by giving your teams the agility to work in parallel, build a wider range of capabilities, and quickly respond to changing internal and external demands.
  
• Embrace changing skill sets: As members of the younger generation join your team, you can rest easy knowing it’s simple to train new developers on AB Suite in Azure. That’s because AB Suite utilizes the familiar Microsoft® Visual Studio® development environment, as well as Azure DevOps services. By providing tools your new hires already know, you’ll reduce ramp-up time and help them make productive contributions to the organization sooner.
  
• Revolutionize DevOps: DevOps unites people, processes, and technology to automate software delivery and provide continuous value to your users. With AB Suite and Azure DevOps, you’ll have a platform that drives operational improvement and continuous innovation, enabling your organization to rapidly innovate and scale new products. Plus, you’ll lower failure rates through automated testing and deployment. It all adds up to a faster, more collaborative, more empowered, and more innovative development team.

To Get Started…

You can begin your AB Suite in Azure journey using ClearPath MCP Developer Studio, a software-only version of the MCP operating environment that includes many of the familiar MCP development tools. Once you’re ready to transition production over to Azure, you’re free to run AB Suite on ClearPath MCP Bronze, Silver, or Gold, depending on the capacity needed.

In addition, you can leverage Unisys Assessment and Transition Services to Cloud. As part of this service engagement, we’ll identify and gather your cloud infrastructure workloads and business requirements, develop an assessment scope, and provide a report that includes recommendations around how best to utilize our Advisory, Operational, and Optimization services. Once you complete the assessment, you can take advantage of such transition services as planning, installation, setup, implementation, deployment, and management.

And with Unisys Managed Services, you can offload many of your day-to-day operational requirements – including database administration – of your MCP and AB Suite environments to our expert staff. We can also help you maintain, develop, and test your AB Suite applications, either by adding staff to your existing team or taking over the full application development process.

The industry is deeply engaged in an era of accelerated innovation. To keep pace, you need to get the most out of AB Suite for MCP – and you need to start today. With AB Suite for MCP in Azure, you’ll have the flexibility, power, and choice to drive your organization’s next evolution. Should you need any help along the way, please feel to reach out to us at ABSuite@unisys.com.