The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has awarded Unisys a new contract change order to upgrade and manage the infrastructure that supports the Pennsylvania State Police's Computerized Criminal History Record Information System (CCHRI). The CCHRI plays a critical role in rapidly disseminating criminal history data and information to criminal justice agencies, non-criminal justice agencies and individuals on request.

Under the terms of the 56-month change order, Unisys will work with Pennsylvania to revamp the current CCHRI infrastructure to accelerate the flow of vital police information between law enforcement jurisdictions.

The Unisys solution is also designed to reduce operational costs by transitioning the state's system to a Unisys ES7000 standardized Intel-based environment with no service level disruptions. Unisys will manage the system as part of Pennsylvania's Data PowerHouse, from which Unisys provides IT outsourcing and technical support for the state, according to Dean Stefan, manager of Pennsylvania's Data PowerHouse initiative.

"Having worked with Unisys for many years, we believe it is the ideal partner to help us transform the Pennsylvania State Police's criminal history system into a next generation law enforcement data center operation," Stefan, said. "We believe the new system will enable the Commonwealth's law enforcement to more efficiently and effectively track, report and share vital information with other law enforcement organizations."

Under the agreement, Unisys will provide CCHRI application development and systems integration, four ES7000 servers, seven commodity servers and third-party software including Microsoft's MS SQL Server 2000 and MS BizTalk Server 2004. Unisys will also provide maintenance, network upgrades, asset management and technical and operations support.

Mark Danis, vice president and managing partner of Unisys North America Public Sector, said systems such as CCHRI are vital to the state police force and citizens of Pennsylvania.

Danis said the new CCHRI project builds on Unisys' relationship as a provider of operations outsourcing and technical support for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's Data PowerHouse initiative.

In 2001, Unisys worked with the Pennsylvania State Police to unite three separate criminal record systems into one powerful system. Unisys also worked with the Commonwealth to successfully consolidate and outsource 21 state agency data centers, making Pennsylvania the first and only state to successfully outsource and consolidate multiple data centers into a single enterprise data center for mission critical application processing.