Case Study

 

A Multi-Tenant Business Services Aggregator

Unisys

Global IT leader Unisys partners with SDG on mission-critical digital product design and development.

Challenges

Diverse customer personas
Competitive market
Complex integrations

SDG Solutions

Product strategy
Roadmapping & prioritization
Vision & value proposition
Experience design
Application development

 

Solidifying a leadership position

Unisys deploys the largest single instance multi-tenant Liferay installation in the world. Over 75 of the world’s largest and most successful companies use Unisys’s portal to manage technology services across end-user, IT operations, and executive roles. However, the portal only functioned in a desktop browser and the self-service functionality, dashboards, and user experience lagged behind user expectations.

SDG was challenged with creating a new fully responsive user experience in direct replacement of the application’s legacy user interfaces. Additionally, new custom self-service functionality and dashboards were created to extend the capabilities of the platform. Unisys’s goal was to solidify their position as the clear market leader in managed IT services — a goal which SDG helped them achieve.

Building the solution together

SDG led the software development lifecycle, including project management, business analysis, user experience design, architecture, development, and quality assurance. The team designed and implemented a world-class responsive web interface which was optimized against leading devices and operating systems. Together, the Unisys and SDG team focused on enabling configuration versus customization to enable Unisys’s clients to include their own branding within the system. This included custom configurations for icons, labels, colors, and imagery as well as content.

Coupled with user specific localization including multi-lingual support, these configurations empower administrators with unmatched control over their sites. Industry leading frameworks and libraries decrease long-term cost of ownership. Device specific testing for current OS/browser version minus one (N-1) compatibility was completed.

Ambitious vision

Unisys envisioned a system that offered:

  • A world-class user experience from any modern device
  • Support for simultaneous highly personalized corporate brands
  • Theme customization through configuration alone
  • Personalized content and functionality based on user role and organization
  • Easily extensible and adaptable feature deployment
  • Commercial quality found in PaaS offerings

    Goals achieved

    Benefits of the new system included:

    • Ability to market and sell the leading managed services offering in existence
    • Easily branded sites for over 75 customers on a single implementation
    • Language localization for menus and content
    • Foundation to upsell and cross-sell additional services
    • Reduced total cost of ownership through custom configurations
    • Single codebase and set of servers to maintain
    • Management of IT services from any connected device

    SDG expertise

    Unisys relies on SDG for deep expertise in:

    • Agile project delivery
    • Fully responsive user experience design
    • Application architecture and development
    • Multi-enterprise integration architecture
    • Device specific quality assurance

      SDG consultants played a variety of roles

      • Agile project delivery and management
      • Business analysis
      • Enterprise architecture and application development
      • Fully responsive user experience development
      • Consultation on long-term product management and operational strategies
      • Documentation and training

      All photographs courtesy of Unsplash.