Software developers, have for long held sway in the job market commanding huge salaries and holding companies to their whims and fancies. The same however was not true for professionals who worked in IT Infrastructure. Though work in the same, complex challenging work environment, the rewards were not that exciting.

Mukul Agrawal, Managing Director, Unisys Global Services India in an interaction with Idhries Ahmad and Abhigna N G of CIOL, says IT Infrastructure people like network administrator, system administrator or database administrator are paid more than the programming people.

"Nobody should be under the illusion that network administrator, system administrator or database administrator are less qualified or less paid. Gone are those days and in Unisys we treat them as equals", adds Mukul.

In his interaction with CIOL, Mukul also talked about to trends in software industry and gave an insight to Unisys collabration with Microsoft and Wipro.

How does Unisys-Microsoft collaboration fit into  Microsoft's Unified Communications architecture?

Unisys and Microsoft are playing complimentary role in the collaboration. Microsoft wants to get up the value chain in terms of high-end servers and that is the area where we collaborate with Microsoft in terms of high-end servers. Unisys has expertise of providing highly reliable mission critical systems and Microsoft wants to scale up for getting into this kind of environment. This leads us to go for a joint go to market strategy where we have a line of servers called ES 7000, which are especially sold for Windows environment.

We are using our enhanced mainframe technology to run Microsoft Windows. The new technology is highly reliable, safe and secure in such a way that we have created a layer on top of the Windows operating system and that is the reason we see high degree of reliability.

One of the applications where the collaboration has been is very useful is server consolidation side. Server consolidation helps company to handle hundreds of servers like file servers, file and print server, small exchange server and other types of servers.

Traditionally, companies may find it difficult to handle hundreds of different servers. What we provide is our specialization in server consolidation. All the servers are collated in a single large box, which is partitioned into various layers and it is also know as Virtual server.

This one box is equivalent to 200 windows servers and incorporating this brings in smooth administration.

The second area we focus is highly scalable for SAP, Oracle ERP applications.

Unisys has been a long preferred company for IT professionals. What are the standards set  by Unisys that makes it so enviable with professionals?

Since Unisys is a highly technical company, we have to be very careful when we speak about technical issues and it depends on the area of specialization what a candidate is opting for. We have different areas such as system software and IT Infrastructure. To apply for a system software area, candidate should have an experience in software whereas for IT Infrastructure candidate should build skills in Windows admin, Unix admin, Linux admin and get updated with the network certification such as Database server, Oracle server, CISCO certification and Microsoft certifications.

Today, we have a high demand for IT Infrastructure candidates in India and people are not aware of the growing demand, which is resulting in acute shortage in this area.  For candidates IT stands for software development and a very few show interest towards IT Infrastructure. Today IT Infrastructure people like network administrator, system administrator or database administrator are paid more than those who involved in software development. So, nobody should be under the illusion that network administrator, system administrator or database administrator are less qualified or less paid and gone are those days and here in Unisys we treat them as equals.

Sometimes we end up paying higher salary due to dearth of  IT Infrastructure professionals. Apart from these, we also have BPO activities such as accounting back office and technical support call center. Diploma or any graduation with good communication skills are enough to meet the eligible requirements in this area.

Tell us more about Unisys. Which are the verticals that the company has been targeting to get more revenues?

Unisys is a Fortune 500 global Information Technology Services and IT outsourcing company with an annual sales of $6 billion and workforce of 35,000 employees worldwide and around 1600 employees here in India.

The company operates in variety of areas including IT outsourcing. We have line of servers, which include Linux, and Windows based high-end servers. Besides these, we also have specific application packages and industry expertise. And we focus on financial, airline and telecom verticals apart from others.

What are the specialized areas you focus in the telecom vertical?

Unisys has strong presence in Value added services and messaging. The most commonly used is messaging platform, where we use value added services. For ex: In a mobile company if you want to leave a message at the provider level, the mobile service provider provides an answering service, which is also known as voice mail service,  wherein you can leave your message. This has emerged as one of the big businesses all over the world.  Apart from this, we provide directory services and emergency services.

How does Unisys use SOA capabilities for payment gateway systems?

SOA capabilities enabled for payment gateway systems have helped a lot for traditional payment system, which is done by cheques. And these cheques are processed in the form of MICR, that is cheque processing machines. Unisys is the world largest company in terms of payment processing or cheque processing. Hence, technology has moved ahead as there was a need for payment gateway, and the process facilitates electronic payments in E-commerce.

Unisys have an alliance with an Wipro, could you tell more about that?

Yes, we have an alliance with Wipro in United States. Historically, Indian vendor like Wipro are very strong in IT application space and might not have such footprint in IT Infrastructure in US. But Unisys is very strong in IT Infrastructure and has hardware/service engineers in around 50 countries across the globe, who can go and resolve the problem by providing engineering services within a short span. I think this is something, which made attractive for Wipro to have an alliance with Unisys.

CIOL Bureau