A discussion on how many organizations face a reckoning to move mainframe applications to a cloud model without degrading the venerable and essential systems of record.

1. Page 1 of 13
How Unisys Enables ClearPath
Mainframe Apps to Transition
Seamlessly to Azure Cloud
Without Code Changes
A discussion on how many organizations face a reckoning to move mainframe applications to a cloud
model without degrading the venerable and essential systems of record.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Unisys and Microsoft.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and you’re
listening to BriefingsDirect.
When applications are mission-critical, where they are hosted matters far less than keeping
them operating smoothly -- as many of them have for decades.
Yet many organizations face a reckoning, a ticking time bomb of sorts, to move mainframe
applications to a cloud model. The trick is to find a dependable, repeatable way to transition to
cloud without degrading these vulnerable and essential systems of record.
Stay with us now as we explore long-awaited means to finally solve the cloud-adoption
quandary. We’re going to learn how Unisys and Microsoft can transition ClearPath Forward
assets to Microsoft Azure cloud without risky code changes.
To learn more about the latest onramps to secure and agile
cloud model adoption, please join me now in welcoming Chuck
Lefebvre, Senior Director of Product Management for ClearPath
Forward at Unisys. Welcome, Chuck.
Chuck Lefebvre: Thank you, Dana. I’m happy to be here.
Gardner: We’re glad to have you. We’re also here with Bob
Ellsworth, Worldwide Director of Mainframe Transformation at
Microsoft. Welcome, Bob.
Bob Ellsworth: Thank you, Dana. Nice to be here as well.
Gardner: Bob, what’s driving the demand nowadays for more
organizations to run more of their legacy apps in the public cloud?
Ellsworth: We see that more and more customers are embracing digital transformation, and
they are finding the cloud an integral part of their digital transformation journey. And when we
think of digital transformation, at first it might begin with optimizing operations, which is a way of
reducing costs by taking on-premises workloads and moving them to the cloud.
Lefebvre

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But the journey just starts there. Customers now want to further empower employees to access
the applications they need to be more efficient and effective, to engage with their customers in
different ways, and to find ways of using cloud technologies to transform products, such as
machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), and business intelligence (BI).
Gardner: And it’s not enough to just have some services or data in the cloud. It seems there’s a
whole greater than the sum of the parts for organizations seeking digital transformation -- to get
more of their IT assets into a cloud or digitally agile environment.
Destination of choice: Cloud
Ellsworth: Yes, that’s absolutely correct. The beauty is that you don’t have to throw away what
you have. You can take legacy workloads such as ClearPath workloads and move those into
the cloud, but then continue the journey by embracing new digital capabilities such the
advanced services such as ML, AI, or BI so you can extend the usefulness and benefits of those
legacy applications.
Gardner: And, of course, this has been a cloud adoption journey for well over 10 years. Do you
sense that something is different now? Are there more means available to get more assets into
a cloud environment? Is this a tipping point?
Ellsworth: It is a tipping point. We’ve seen -- especially around
the mainframe, which is what I focus on -- a huge increase in
customer interest and selection of the cloud in the last 1.5 years
as the preferred destination. And one of the reasons is that
Azure has absolutely demonstrated its capability to run these
mission- and business-critical workloads.
Gardner: Are these cloud transitions emerging differently
across the globe? Is there a regional bias of some sort? Is the
public sector lagging or leading? How about vertical industries?
Where is this cropping up first and foremost?
Ellsworth: We’re seeing it occur in all industries; in particular,
financial services. We find there are more mainframes in
financial services, banking capital markets, and insurance than in any other industries.
So we see a propensity there where, again, the cloud has become a destination of choice
because of its capability to run mission- and business-critical workloads. But in addition, we’re
seeing this in state and local governments, and in the US Federal Government. The challenge
in the government sector is the long cycle it takes to get funding for these projects. So, it’s not a
lack of desire, it’s more the time it takes to move through the funding process.
Gardner: Chuck, I’m still surprised all these years into the cloud journey that there’s still such a
significant portion of data and applications that are not in the cloud environment. What’s holding
things back? What’s preventing enterprises from taking advantage of cloud benefits?
Lefebvre: A lot of it is inertia. And in some cases, incorrect assumptions about what would be
involved in moving. That’s what’s so attractive about our Unisys ClearPath solution. We can
Ellsworth

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help clients move their ClearPath workloads without change. We take that ClearPath software
stack from MCP initially and move it and re-platform it on Microsoft Azure.
And that application and data comes across with no re-compilation, no refactoring of the data;
it’s a straightforward transition. So, I think now that we have that in place, that transition is going
to go a lot smoother and really enable that move to occur.
I also second what Bob said earlier. We see a lot of interest from our financial partners. We
have a large number of banking application partners running on our ClearPath MCP
environment, and those partners are ready to go and help their clients as an option to move
their workloads into the Azure public cloud.
Pandemic puts focus on cloud capabilities
Gardner: Has the disruption from the coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease been influencing
this transition? Is it speeding it up? Slowing it down? Maybe some other form of impact?
Lefebvre: I haven’t seen it affecting any, either acceleration or deceleration. In our client-base
most of the people were primarily interested initially in ensuring their people could work from
home with the environments they have in place.
I think now that that’s settled in, they’ve sorted out their virtual private networks (VPNs) and their
always-on access, processes, that perhaps now we’ll see some initiatives evolving. I think,
initially, it was just businesses supporting their employees working from home.
My perspective is that that should be enabled equally as well, whether they are running their
backend systems of record in a public cloud or on-premises. Either way would work for them.
Gardner: Bob, at Microsoft, are you seeing any impact from the pandemic in terms of how
people are adopting cloud services?
Learn How to Transition
ClearPath Workloads
To the Cloud
Ellsworth: We’re actually seeing an increase in customer interest and adoption of cloud
services because of COVID-19. We’re seeing that in particular in some of our solutions such as
Teams for doing collaboration and webinars, and connecting with others remotely. We’re seeing
a big increase there.
And Office 365, we’ve seen a huge increase in deployments of customers using the Office 365
technology. In addition, Azure; we’ve also seen a big increase in Azure consumption as
customers are dealing with the application growth and requirements of running these
applications.

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As far as new customers that are considering
moving to the cloud, I had thought originally, back
in March when this was starting to hit, that our
conversations would slow down as people dealt
with more immediate needs. But, in fact, it was
about a two-to-three-week slow down. But now,
we’re seeing a dramatic increase in interest in having conversations about what are the right
solutions and methods to move the workloads to the cloud.
So, the adoption is accelerating as customers look for ways to reduce cost, increase agility, and
find new ways of running the workloads that they have today.
Gardner: Chuck, another area of impact in the market is around skills. There is often either a
lack of programmers for some of these older languages or the skills needed to run your own
data centers. Is there a skill factor that’s moving the transition to cloud?
Lefebvre: Oh, there certainly is. One of the attractive elements of a public cloud is the
infrastructure layer of the IT environment is managed by that cloud provider. So as we see our
clients showing interest in moving to the public cloud -- first with things like, as Bob said, Office
365 and maybe file shares with SharePoint – they are now looking at doing that for mainframe
applications. And when they do that, they no longer have to be worried about that talent to do
the care and feeding of that infrastructure. As we move those clients in that direction, we’re
going to take care of that ClearPath infrastructure, the day-to-day management of that
environment, and that will be included as part of our offering.
We expect most clients – rather than managing it themselves in the cloud – will defer to us, and
that will free up their staff to do other things. They will have retirements, but less risk.
Gardner: Bob, another issue that’s been top-of-mind for people is security. One of the things we
found is that security can be a tough problem when you are transitioning, when you change a
development environment, go from development to production, or move from on-premises to
cloud.
How are we helping people remain secure during a cloud transition, and also perhaps benefit
from a better security posture once they make the transition?
Take time to transition, safely, securely
Ellsworth: We always recommend making security part of the planning process. When you’re
thinking of transforming from a datacenter solution to the cloud, part of that planning is for the
security elements. We always look to collaborate with our partners, such as Unisys, to help
define that security infrastructure and deployment.
Now, we’re seeing a dramatic
increase in interest in having
conversations about what are the
right solutions and methods to
move the workloads to the cloud.

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What’s great about the Azure solutions is we’ve
focused on hybrid as the way of deploying customers’
workloads. Most customers aren’t ready to move
everything to the cloud all at the same time. For that
reason, and with the fact that we focus on hybrid, we
allow a customer to deploy portions of the workload to
the cloud and the other portions in their data center.
Then, over time, they can transition to the cloud.
But during that process supporting your high levels of security for user access, identity
management, or even controls of access to the right applications and data -- that’s all done
through the planning and using technologies such as Microsoft Active Directory and
synchronization with Azure Active Directory. So with that planning it’s so important to ensure
successful deployments and ensure the high levels of security that customers require.
Gardner: Chuck, anything to offer on the security?
Lefebvre: Yes, we’ll be complementing everything Bob just described with our Unisys Stealth
technology. It allows always-on access and isolation capabilities for deployment of any of our
applications from Unisys, but in particular the ClearPath environment. And that can be
completely deployed in Azure or, as Bob said, in a hybrid environment across an enterprise. So
we are excited about that deployment of Stealth to complement the rigor that Microsoft applies
to the security planning process.
Gardner: We’ve described what’s driving organizations to the cloud, the fact that it’s
accelerating, that there’s a tipping point in what adoption can be accomplished safely and
reliably. We’ve also talked about what’s held people back and their challenges.
Let’s now look at what’s different about the latest solutions for the cloud transition journey. For
Unisys, Chuck, how are your customers reconciling the mainframe past with the cloud future?
No change in digital footprint
Lefebvre: We are able to transition ClearPath applications with no change. It’s been roughly
10 years since we’ve been deploying these systems on Intel platforms, and in the case of MCP
hosting it on a Microsoft Windows Server kernel. That’s been in place under our Unisys Libra
brand for more than 10 years now.
In the last couple of years, we’ve also been allowing clients to deploy that software stack on
virtualized servers of their choice: on Microsoft Hyper-V and the VMware virtualization
platforms. So it’s a natural transition for us to move that and offer that in Azure cloud. We can
do that because of the layered approach in our technology. It’s allowed us to present an
approach to our clients that is very risk-free, very straightforward.
The ClearPath software stack sits on a Windows kernel, which is also at the foundation level
offered by the Azure hybrid infrastructure. The applications therefore don’t change a bit, literally.
The digital footprint is the same. It’s just running in a different place, initially as platform-as-a-
service (PaaS).
We focus on hybrid, we allow a
customer to deploy portions of
the workload to the cloud and
other portions in their data
center. Then, over time, they
can transition to the cloud.

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The cloud adoption transition is really a very low-risk, safe, and efficient journey to the public
cloud for those existing solutions that our clients have on ClearPath.
Gardner: And you described this as an ongoing logical, cascading transition -- standing on the
shoulders of your accomplishments -- and then continuing forward. How was that different from
earlier migrations, or a lift-and-shift, approach? Why is today’s transition significantly different
from past migrations?
Lefebvre: Well, a migration often involves third-parties doing a recompilation, a refactoring of
the application, so taking the COBOL code, recompiling it, refactoring it into Java, and then
breaking it up, and moving the data out of our data formats and into a different data structure.
All of those steps have risk and disruption associated with them. I’m sure there are third-parties
that have proven that. That can work. It just takes a long time and introduces risk.
For Unisys ClearPath clients who have invested years and years in those systems of record,
that entire stack can now run in a public cloud using our approach -- as I said before -- with
absolutely not a single bit of change to the application or the data.
Learn How to Transition
ClearPath Workloads
To the Cloud
Gardner: Bob, does that jibe with what you are seeing? Is the transition approach as Bob
described it an advantage over a migration process as he described?
Ellsworth: Yes, Chuck described it very well. We see the very same thing. What I have found, -
- and I’ve been working with Unisys clients since I joined Microsoft in 2001, early on going to the
Unisys UNITE conference -- was that Unisys clients are very committed and dedicated to their
platform. They like the solutions they are using. They are used to using those developer tools.
They have built up the business-critical, mission-critical applications and workloads.
For those customers that continue to be
committed to the platform, absolutely, this kind of
what I call “re-platforming” could easily be called
a “transition.” You are taking what you currently
have and simply moving it onto the cloud. It is
absolutely the lowest risk, the least cost, and the
quickest time-to-deployment approach.
For those customers, just like with every platform, when you have an interest to transform to a
different platform, there are other methods available. But I would say the vast majority of
committed Unisys customers want to stay on the platform, and this provides the fastest way to
get to the cloud -- with the less risk and the quickest benefits.
Gardner: Chuck, the process around cloud adoption has been going on for a while. For those of
us advocating for cloud 10 or 12 years ago, we were hoping that it would get to the point where
it would be a smooth transition. Tell me about the history and the benefits of how ClearPath
Forward and Azure had come together specifically? How long have Microsoft and Unisys been
at this? Why is now, as we mentioned earlier, a tipping point?
You are taking what you currently
have and simply moving it onto the
cloud. It is absolutely the lowest risk,
the least cost, and the quickest time-
to-deployment approach.

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Lefebvre: We’ve been working on this for a little over a year. We did some initial work with two
of our financial application partners and North America banking partners and the initial testing
was very positive. Then as we were finishing our engineering work to do the validation, our
internal Unisys IT organization, which operates about 25 production applications to run the
business, went ahead in parallel with us and deployed half of those on MCP in Azure, using the
very process that I described earlier.
Today, they are running 25 production applications. About half of them have been there for nine
months and the other half for the last two months. They are supporting things like invoicing our
customers, tracking our supply chain status, and so, a number of critical applications.
We have taken that journey not just from an engineering point of view, but we’ve proven it to
ourselves. We drank our own champagne, so to speak, and that’s given us a lot of confidence.
It’s the right way to go, and we expect our clients will see those benefits as well.
Gardner: We haven’t talked about the economics too much. Are you finding, now that you’ve
been doing this for a while, that there is a compelling economic story? A lot of people are fearful
that a transition or migration would be very costly, that they won’t necessarily save anything by
doing this, and so maybe are resistant. But what’s the dollars’ and cents’ impact that you have
been seeing now that you’ve been doing this while transitioning ClearPath to Azure?
Rapid returns
Lefebvre: Yes, there are tangible financial benefits that our IT organization has measured. In
these small isolated applications, they calculated about a half-a-million dollars in savings across
three years in their return on investment (ROI) analysis. And that return was nearly immediate
because the transition for them was mostly about planning the outage period to ensure a non-
stop operation and make sure we always supported the business. There wasn’t actually a lot of
labor, just more planning time. So that return was almost immediate.
Gardner: Bob, anything to offer on the economics of making a smooth transition to cloud?
Ellsworth: Yes, absolutely. I have found
a couple of catalysts for customers as
far as cost savings. If a customer is
faced with a potential hardware upgrade
-- perhaps the server they are running
on is near end-of-life -- by moving the
workload to the cloud and only paying
for the consumption of what you use, it allows you to avoid the hardware upgrade costs. So you
get some nice and rapid benefits in cost avoidance.
In addition, for workloads such as test and development environments, or user acceptance
testing environments, in addition to production uses, the beauty of the cloud pricing is you only
pay for what you are consuming.
So for those test and development systems, you don’t need to have hardware sitting in the
corner waiting to be used during peak periods. You can spin up an environment in the cloud, do
If a customer is faced with a potential
hardware upgrade … by moving the
workload to the cloud and only paying for
the consumption of what you use, it allows
you to avoid the hardware upgrade costs.

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all of your testing, and then spin it back down. You get some very nice cost savings by not
having dedicated hardware for those test and development environments.
Gardner: Let’s dig into the technology. What’s under the hood that’s allowing this seamless
cloud transition, Chuck?
Secret sauce
Lefebvre: Underneath the hood is the architecture that we have transformed to over the last 10
years where we are already running our ClearPath systems on Intel-based hardware on a
Microsoft Windows Server kernel. That allows that environment to be used and re-platformed in
the same manner.
To accomplish that, originally, we had some very clever technology that allows the Unisys
compilers generating unique instructions to be emulated on an Intel-based, Windows-based
server.
That’s really the fundamental underpinning that first allowed those clients to run on Intel servers
instead of on proprietary Unisys-designed chips. Once that’s been completed, we’re able to be
much more flexible on where it’s deployed. The rigor to which Microsoft has ensured that
Windows is Windows -- no matter if it’s running on a server you buy, whether it’s virtualized on
Hyper-V, or virtualized in Azure -- really allows us to achieve that seamless operation of running
in any of those three different models and environments.
Gardner: Where do you see the secret sauce, Bob? Is the capability to have Windows be pure,
if you will, across the hybrid spectrum of deployment models?
Learn How to Transition
ClearPath Workloads
To the Cloud
Ellsworth: Absolutely, the secret sauce as Chuck described was that transformation from
proprietary instruction sets to standard Intel instruction sets for their systems, and then the
beauty of running today on-premises on Hyper-V or VMware as a virtual machine (VM).
And then the great thing is with the technologies available, it’s very, very easy to take VMs
running in the data center and migrate them to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VMs running in
the cloud. So, seamless transformation and making that migration.
You’re taking everything that’s running in your
production system, or test and development
systems, and simply deploying them up in the
cloud’s VM instead of on-premises. So, a great
process. Definitely, the earlier investment that was
made allows that capability to be able to utilize the
cloud.
Gardner: Do you have early adopters who have gone through this? How do they benefit?
You’re taking everything that’s
running in your production system or
test and development systems, and
simply deploying them up in the
cloud’s VM instead of on-premises.

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Private- and public-sector success stories
Lefebvre: As I indicated earlier, our own Unisys IT operation has many production applications
running our business on MCP. Those have all been moved from our own data center on an
MCP Libra system to now running in the Microsoft Azure cloud. Our Unisys IT organization has
been a long-time partner and user of Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint in the cloud.
Everything has now moved. This, in fact, was one of the last remaining Unisys IT operations
that was not in the public cloud. That was part of our driver, and they are achieving the benefits
that we had hoped for.
We also have two external clients, a banking partner is about to deploy a disaster recovery (DR)
instance of their on-premises MCP banking application. That’s coming from our partner, Fiserv.
Fiserv’s premier banking application is now available for running in Azure on our MCP systems.
One of the clients is choosing to host a DR instance in Azure to support their on-premises
production workload. They like that because, as Bob said, they only have to pay for it when they
fire it up if they need to use that DR environment.
We have another large state government project that we’re just about to sign, where that client
will be doing some of their ClearPath MCP workload and transition to and manage that in an
Azure public cloud.
Once that contract is signed and we get agreement from that organization, we will be using that
as one of our early use case studies.
Gardner: The public sector, with all of their mainframe apps, seems like a no-brainer to me for
these transitions to the cloud. Any examples from the public sector that illustrate that
opportunity?
Ellsworth: We have a number of customers, specifically on the Unisys MCP platform, that are
evaluating moving their workloads from their data centers into the cloud. We don’t have a
production system as far as I know yet, but they’re in the late stages of making that decision.
There are so many ways of utilizing the cloud, for things like DR, at a very low cost, instead of
having to have a separate data center or failover system. Customers can even leave their
production on-premises in the short-term and stand up their test and development in the cloud
and run MCP system in that way.
And then, once they’re in the cloud, they gain the capability to set up a high-availability DR
system or high-availability production system, either within the same Azure data center, or
failover from one system to another if they have an outage, and all at a very low cost. So, there
are great benefits.
One other benefit is elasticity. When I talk
about customers, they say, “Well, gee, I
have this end-of-month process and I
need a larger mainframe then because of
those occasional higher capacity
requirements. Well, the beauty of the
The beauty of the cloud is the capability to
grow and shrink those VMs when you
need more capacity for such end-of-month
process, for example.

10. Page 10 of 13
cloud is the capability to grow and shrink those VMs when you need more capacity for such
end-of-month process, for example.
Again, you don’t have to pre-purchase the hardware. You really only pay for the consumption of
the capacity when you need it. So, there are great advantages and that’s what we talk to
customers about. They can get benefits from considering deploying new systems in the cloud.
Those are some great examples of why we’re in late-stage conversations with several
customers about deploying the solution.
Increased data analytics
Gardner: I supposed it’s a little bit early to address this, but are there higher-order benefits
when these customers do make the cloud transition? You mentioned earlier AI, ML, and getting
more of your data into an executable environment where you can take advantage of analytics
across more and larger data sets.
Is there another shoe to drop when it comes to the ROI? Will they be able to do things with their
data that just couldn’t have been done before, once you make a transition to cloud?
Ellsworth: Yes, that’s absolutely correct. When you move the systems up to the cloud, you’re
now closer to all the new workloads and the advanced cloud services you can utilize to, for
example, analyze all that data. It’s really about turning more data into intelligent action.
Now, if you think of back to the 1980s
and 1990s, or even 2000s, when you
were building custom applications, you
had to pretty much code everything
yourselves. Today, the way you build an
application is to consume services.
There’s no reason for a customer to build a ML application from scratch. Instead, you consume
ML services from the cloud. So, once you’re in the cloud, it opens up a world of possibilities to
being able to continue that digital business transformation journey.
Lefebvre: And I can confirm that that’s a key element for our product proposition as well as
from a ClearPath point of view. We have some existing technology, a particular component
called Data Exchange, that does an outstanding change and data capture model. We can pump
the data coming into that backend system of record and using, Kafka, for example, feed that
data directly into an AI or ML application that’s already in place.
One of the key areas for future investment -- now that we have done the re-platforming to PaaS
and IaaS – is extending our ePortal technology and other enabling software to ensure that these
ClearPath applications really fit in well and leverage that cloud architecture. That’s the direction
we see a lot of benefit in as we bring these applications into the public Azure cloud.
The cloud journey begins
Gardner: Chuck, if you are a ClearPath Forward client, you have these apps and data, what
steps should you be taking now in order to put yourself in an advantageous position to make the
There’s no reason for a customer to build
an ML application from scratch. Instead,
you consume ML services from the cloud.

11. Page 11 of 13
cloud transition? Are there pre-steps before the journey? Or how should you be thinking in order
to take advantage of these newer technologies?
Lefebvre: First of all, they should engage with their Unisys and Microsoft contacts that work
with your organization to begin consultation on that journey. Data backup, data replication, DR,
those elements around data and your policy with respect to data are the things that are likely
going to change the most as you move to a different platform -- whether that’s from a Libra
system to an on-premises virtualized infrastructure or to Azure.
What you’ve done for replication with a certain disk subsystem probably won’t be there any
longer. It’ll be done in a different way, and likely it’ll be done in a better way. The way you do
your backups will be done differently.
Now, we have partnered with Dynamic Solutions International (DSI) and they offer a virtualized
virtual tape solution so that you can still use your backup scripts on MCP to do backups in
exactly the same way in Azure. But you may choose to alter the way you do backups.
So, your strategy for data and how you handle that, which is so very important to these
enterprise class mainframe applications, that’s probably the place where you’ll need to do the
most thinking and planning, around data handling.
Gardner: For those familiar with BriefingsDirect, we like to end our discussions with a forward-
looking vision, an idea of what’s coming next. So when it comes to migrating, transitioning,
getting more into the cloud environments -- be that hybrid or pure public cloud -- what’s going to
come next in terms of helping people make the transition but also giving them the best payoff
when they get there?
The cloud journey continues
Ellsworth: It’s a great question, because you should think of the world of opportunity, of
possibility. I look back at my 47 years in the industry and it’s been incredible to see the
transformations that have occurred, the technology advancements that have occurred, and they
are coming fast and furious. There’s nothing slowing it down.
And so, when we see the cloud today, a lot of customers are still considering the cloud for
strategy and for building any new solutions. You go into the cloud first and have to justify staying
on-premises, and then customers move to a cloud-only strategy where they’re able to not only
deploy new solutions but migrate their existing workloads such as ClearPath up to the cloud.
They get to a point where they would be able to shut down most of what they run in their data
centers and get out of that business of operating IT infrastructure and having operation support
provided for them as-a-service.
Next, they move into transforming
through cultural change in their own
staff. Today the people that are
managing, maintaining, and running new
systems will have an opportunity to learn
new skills and new ways of doing things, such as cloud technology. What I see over the next
The people that are managing, maintaining,
and running new systems will have an
opportunity to learn new skills and new ways
of doing things, such as cloud technology.

12. Page 12 of 13
two to three years is a continuation of that journey, the transformation not just of the solutions
the customers use, but also the culture of the people that operate and run those solutions.
Gardner: Chuck, for your installed base across the world, why should they be optimistic about
the next two or three years? What’s your vision for how their situation is only going to improve?
Learn How to Transition
ClearPath Workloads
To the Cloud
Lefebvre: Everything that we’ve talked about today is focused on our ClearPath MCP market
and the technology that those clients use. As we go forward into 2021, we’ll be providing similar
capabilities for our ClearPath OS 2200 client base, and we’ll be growing the offering.
Today, we’re starting with the low-end of the customer base: development, test, DR, and the
smaller images. But as the Microsoft Azure cloud matures, as it scales up to handle our scaling
needs for our larger clients, we’ll see that maturing. We’ll be offering the full range of our
products in the Azure cloud, right on up to our largest systems.
That builds confidence across the board in our client base; in Microsoft and in Unisys. We want
to crawl, then walk, and then run. That journey, we believe, is the safest way to go. And as I
mentioned earlier, this initial workload transformation is occurring through a re-platforming
approach. The real exciting work is bringing cloud-native capabilities to do better integration of
those systems of record, with better systems of engagement, that the cloud-native technology is
offering. And we have some really interesting pieces under development now that will make that
additional transformation straightforward. Our clients will be able to leverage that – and continue
to extend that backend investment in those systems. So we’re really excited about the future.
Gardner: I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there. You’ve been listening to a sponsored
BriefingsDirect discussion on the latest on-ramps to secured agile cloud adoption for mainframe
applications. And we’ve learned how a partnership between Unisys and Microsoft Azure allows
many organizations to move their applications and data to a cloud model without degrading
these vulnerable and essential systems of record.
So please join me in thanking our guests, Chuck Lefebvre, Senior Director of Product
Management for ClearPath Forward at Unisys. Thank you so much, Chuck.
Lefebvre: Thank you.
Gardner: And a big thank you as well to Bob Ellsworth, Worldwide Director of Mainframe
Transformation at Microsoft. Thank you, sir.
Ellsworth: Thank you.
Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect cloud computing
adoption best practices discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions,
your host throughout this series of Unisys- and Microsoft-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next
time.

13. Page 13 of 13
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Unisys and Microsoft.
A discussion on how many organizations face a reckoning to move mainframe applications to a cloud
model without degrading the venerable and essential systems of record. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.
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