Unisys Australia has consolidated its Sydney operations in one data centre with a keen eye to shoring up the competition in the outsourcing and managed service space.

The Unisys offices were built around the data centre in Rhodes in western Sydney. The centre houses the Unisys call reception centre, the service desk, network command centre and the customer service centre. It will be the east-coast hub in Australia for the Unisys managed services centre, mortgage processing operations, cheque processing operations and the software research and development lab.

The cheque processing facility processes on average 1.2 million cheques and remittance slips daily for Westpac, St George, Bendigo Bank, Adelaide Bank, Suncorp Metway, American Express and Australia Post.

Brett Roberts, Unisys data centre and operational manager, said the facility caters for all possible hardware configurations, and currently has a fleet of Wintel boxes from Dell and Unisys as well as mainframes.

"It is built as a data centre with offices on top - it took one year to design, two years to construct and we have our own generators, separate air conditioning for the data centre and diesel tank generators underground," Roberts said.

"The centre was built for 900 watts of power per square unit and currently only runs on 10 percent of total air conditioning power which runs off a separate power supply."

Unisys Australia managing director Mike Ettling said the company is equipping itself for growth in what remains an extremely competitive market. Ettling said this growth will largely be through IT outsourcing (ITO), a practice Ettling believes is the "hidden jewel in the Unisys crown".

"Unisys over the years has been very proactive in marketing our BPO capability, system integration and servers and hardware but the area you will see us become a lot more aggressive is our ITO capability - we are going to tackle that market head-on," Ettling said.