Despite the fact that first day orders for Unisys Corp’s new high-end 2200/900 mainframe had mysteriously shrunk to over $150m from $200m between the issue of the UK release that was the basis of our story on Tuesday, and the conference called to launch the machine in New York later in the day (CI No 1,765), the new machine is an impressive extension of the OS 1100 family. In the US it will begin initial shipping in fourth quarter of this year, and conforms to the company’s new Unisys Architecture, designed to position the mainframe as an information hub for critical enterprise information. The company promises high-volume transaction processing, unlimi ted growth, virtually non-stop continuous processing, automated operation, high security, fast and efficient application development, and management of large databases and networks. The Open Environment on the 2200/900 includes Posix 1003.1 and 1003.2 interfaces; Open Systems Interconnection multi-protocol routing and local-to-wide area network interconnection; TCP/IP support; enhanced Systems Network Architecture and support of Ethernet. It also offers a complete Unix environment guested under OS 1100. The biggest of the first day orders is something of a coup for Unisys: the Australian Customs Service contract, worth more than $30m, was won in competitive bidding with IBM Corp. Multiple Unisys 2200 Series mainframe hubs are intended to provide processing security and disaster back-up for critical Customs operations applications, such as an international law enforcement database and revenue collection. These will be developed using the Linc II software engineering environment. The Customs Service will also install multiple Unisys U 6000 Series Unix systems that will support EaDI Plus, the Unisys suite of electronic data interchange interfaces, and administrative applications. The current Customs operations are based on both Unisys and Hitachi Data Systems mainframes, and the contract calls for Unisys to migrate existing IBM-compatible applications to the 2200s.
