U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE'S UNISYS ES7000 TO PROVIDE 60,000 EMPLOYEES WITH 24X7 WEB ACCESS TO HUMAN RESOURCES AND BENEFIT PROGRAMS.

Extending its commitment to ensuring a healthy work/life balance for its employees, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) selected the Unisys e-@ction Enterprise Server ES7000 to provide round-the-clock Web access to its human resources and benefit programs for more than 60,000 federal employees.

When USDA contracted Unisys to upgraded its PeopleSoft application to feature Web-based interface capabilities, it replaced its UNIX/RISC-based Hewlett-Packard HP9000 server with a Unisys ES7000 to accommodate future growth and to benefit from the server's mainframe-class performance and reliability.

Operating in a highly decentralized environment, the USDA required a solution to unify its people and organization structure. With offices in more than 2,600 locations under the USDA umbrella, various department heads share the common goal of fostering better workforce management by implementing standardized training and development programs throughout the organization.

The Unisys ES7000 server will anchor USDA's online work/life programs, providing agency workers with access to a single, uniform index of employee information and payroll reporting instantaneously, at any time or from any place, over a secure Internet connection.

"Centralizing a workforce of 60,000 employees is certainly an enormous feat, but it is less daunting when we have the power, reliability and security of the Unisys ES7000 server backing our initiatives," said Hans Heindenreich, CAMS Project Director for USDA. "By moving our HR/benefit administration to the online arena, we will be able to simplify administration processing and implement a standardized approach for managing key employee programs with less bureaucracy and paper."

The Unisys ES7000 is based on the Unisys Cellular MultiProcessing (CMP) server architecture, which provides an array of computing capabilities required for enterprise-class e-business computing that are well known to users of large-scale computers, but unprecedented in computing environments using Microsoft and Intel technology.

Designed for the power of Intel Itanium processors, the CMP architecture accommodates up to 32 Intel Pentium III Xeon processors, which can be field-upgraded to 64-bit Itanium processors or combined with Itanium in the same server. These advantages enable CMP-based servers to match the performance of UNIX systems in enterprise-class e-business and other critical applications at a fraction of the price.

"In addition to providing seamless online support and availability to a large and widely distributed agency, the ES7000 offers an organization like the USDA the increased flexibility and freedom to manage daily computing challenges," said Mike Thomas, vice president, Unisys Global Solution Partners. "With its powerful scale-up capabilities and colossal I/O bandwidth, the ES7000 provides highly complex and decentralized institutions with a simple solution to manage intensive application and database demands from one, centrally managed source."