Those with long IT backgrounds may associate Unisys with mainframes, or large enterprise services integration, but the company is driving to become more of a player in open source software and Linux technology.

Unisys recently released new offerings around its Open and Secure Integrated Solution (OASIS), a package of professional services and open source software platforms, integrated and tested by the company for specific tasks. OASIS, released last year, uses packages such as Red Hat Linux, JBoss application server, MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, as well as the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) runtime environment, combined with integration and planning services for implementing these technologies. The previous OASIS packages targeted applications such as application and database serving, and migration services.

New task-specific OASIS suites are geared at migrating users of IBM mainframes, Unix and Novell NetWare to Linux. The OASIS Oracle Grid Accelerator is a product/services offering from Unisys and Oracle, aimed at migrating users of Oracle 10G Real Application Cluster (RAC) off of Unix to Linux.

OASIS Enterprise Asset Modernization targets older mainframe environments for a Linux migration, and includes tools and services for porting applications and providing mainframe-like availability for Linux servers.

OASIS Unix to Linux Migration is targeted directly at users of Unisys' ES7000 series enterprise server platform, and provides software and services for converting that machine from Unix to Linux.