‘Drive to build local dot-coms to continue’

The year 2000 saw the proliferation of information technology (IT) as more brick-and-mortar companies transformed into e-businesses, and the drive for building local dot-coms will continue this year, Gabriel Leiva, Unisys Phils. president and general manager, said.

The market has become IT-savvy, and it expects more from the industry. Leiva said, "Most people now understand some kind of information technology, from mobile phones to PDAs to e-business. They do demand more from IT, in the sense that they look up to vendors or suppliers as partners. We are moving to the time when anyone can use information technology through different touch points – the home, kiosks, mobiles, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and banks."

Leiva expects IT products and services from application service providers (ASPs), call centers, data centers and enterprise servers to take the lead in the industry this year.

Major IT projects are seen to come from the areas of customer relationship management (CRM), broadband, Internet security, e-business and e-Government. The country will also see more integration of information technology into the operations of various government agencies.

Unisys Phils., an e-business solutions company serving the public sector, financial and communications markets, will continue the implementation of the Land Title Computerization Project of the Land Registration Authority (LRA), together with the consortium it formed with partners Stradec, Comfac and FF Cruz. The group was awarded the project last April.

The LRA project involves the conversion into digital form of all land titles, even those that date back to over 50 years, and maps for easy storage and retrieval. "This is highly complex in nature as it involves several state-of-the art and best-of-breed technology solutions that need to be integrated and implemented in record time," Leiva said.

Unisys also expects to grow significantly in the enterprise server market as more companies turn to e-businesses. It will aggressively push its e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000, a mainframe based on leading edge technology from Microsoft Windows 2000 Datacenter Server and Intel processor.

Launched this year, ES7000 features Unisys’ revolutionary technology Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) architecture and scales up to 32 processors, which can be partitioned to run multiple operating systems on a single server in multiples of four.

To complement its extensive experience in implementing highly complex system integration projects, Unisys has concentrated on Microsoft and Cisco certification for its engineers and IS consultants, plus training on imaging, e-commerce, CRM and call center management.