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Late 2008, the company has been in a continuous period of cost-shedding, including benefits cuts and a number of layoffs. The workforce is now down to under 26,000 from a peak of 120,000, a loss of more than 78%.<ref>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/23/unisys_layoffs/</ref>
Late 2008, the company has been in a continuous period of cost-shedding, including benefits cuts and a number of layoffs. The workforce is now down to under 26,000 from a peak of 120,000, a loss of more than 78%.<ref>http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/23/unisys_layoffs/</ref>


2009 Unisys Boasts about firing American workers "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India " Richard Marcello, president of technology, consulting, and integration solutions at Unisys said.<ref>http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/110309-unisys-official-says-cloud-computing.html</ref> The company completed a one-for-ten reverse stock split in October 2009 in an attempt to prop up stock prices and fend off delisting.<ref>{{Cite news|title=Unisys Board Approves One-for-Ten Reverse Stock Split |publisher=Unisys|date=6 October 2009|url=http://www.unisys.com/unisys/news/detail.jsp?id=1120000970000310238}}</ref>
2009: Unisys Boasts about firing American workers; "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India" (Richard Marcello, president of technology, consulting, and integration solutions)<ref>http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/110309-unisys-official-says-cloud-computing.html</ref> The company completed a one-for-ten reverse stock split in October 2009 in an attempt to prop up stock prices and fend off delisting.<ref>{{Cite news|title=Unisys Board Approves One-for-Ten Reverse Stock Split |publisher=Unisys|date=6 October 2009|url=http://www.unisys.com/unisys/news/detail.jsp?id=1120000970000310238}}</ref>


2010 Unisys has been reinventing itself since mainframe makers Sperry and Burroughs were mashed up in 1986. Sells off its health information management business to for capital preservation.<ref>{{Cite news|title=Unisys jettisons Medicare processing biz |publisher=The Register |date=19 January 2010 |url=http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/19/unisys_sells_him/}}</ref>
2010: Unisys sold its Medicare-processing Health Information Management service to Molina Healthcare for $135 million.<ref>{{Cite news|title=Unisys jettisons Medicare processing biz |publisher=The Register |date=19 January 2010 |url=http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/19/unisys_sells_him/}}</ref>


==See also==
==See also==

Revision as of 09:35, 10 November 2010

Unisys Corporation
Company typePublic (NYSE: UIS)
IndustryComputer Services
Founded1886 as American Arithmometer Company
1986 as Unisys
HeadquartersBlue Bell, Pennsylvania, United States
Key people
J. Edward Coleman, CEO and Chairman
ProductsComputer Servers and Solutions
RevenueDecrease $4.6 billion USD (2009)[1]
Increase $114.5 million USD (2009)[1]
Number of employees
25,600 (2010)[2]
WebsiteUnisys

Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS), headquartered in Blue Bell,[3][4] Pennsylvania, United States, and incorporated in Delaware,[5] is a global provider of information technology services and programs.

History

Unisys offices in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

Unisys was formed in September 1986 through the merger of the mainframe corporations Sperry and Burroughs, with Burroughs buying Sperry for $4.8 billion. The name was chosen in an internal competition when an intern, Charles Ayoub, came up with the UNISYS acronym from United Information Systems. The merger was the largest in the computer industry at the time and made Unisys the second largest computer company, with annual revenue of $10.5 billion.[6] At the time of the merger, Unisys had approximately 120,000 employees.

In addition to hardware, both Burroughs and Sperry had a history of working on U.S. government contracts. Unisys continues to provide hardware, software, and services to various government agencies.[citation needed]

Soon after the merger, the market for proprietary mainframe-class systems—the mainstream product of Unisys and its competitors such as IBM—began a long-term decline that continues, at a lesser rate, today. In response, Unisys made the strategic decision to shift into high end servers (e.g., 32 processor Windows Servers), as well as information technology (IT) services such as systems integration, outsourcing, and related technical services, while holding onto the profitable revenue stream from maintaining its installed base of proprietary mainframe hardware and applications.[citation needed]

Important events in the company's history include the development of the 2200 series in 1986, including the UNISYS 2200/500 CMOS mainframe, and the Micro A in 1989, the first[citation needed] desktop mainframe, the UNISYS ES7000 servers in 2000, and the Unisys blueprinting method of visualizing business rules and workflow in 2004.[citation needed]

In 1988 the company acquired Convergent Technologies, makers of CTOS.[citation needed]

In March 2006, Unisys sold its Japanese distributor stake for $374 million. The sale was intended to streamline the company and to fund the layoff of 3,600 employees, accounting for about 10% of the Unisys employee workforce at that time.[citation needed] On October 7, 2008, J. Edward Coleman replaced J. McGrath as CEO and Chairman.[citation needed]

On November 11, 2008, the company was removed from the Standard & Poor's 500 index. At the close of trading on November 7 the market capitalization of the company had fallen to $313 million, below the S&P 500 minimum of $4 billion.[7]

Products, services, and customers

Paralleling larger trends in the U.S. information technology industry, an increasing amount of Unisys revenue comes from services rather than equipment sales. In 2008, the ratio was 88% for services, up from 65% in 1997.[8] Unisys clients are typically large corporations or government agencies, and have included Washington Mutual, the New York Clearinghouse, Dell, Lufthansa Systems, Lloyds TSB, EMC, SWIFT, various state governments (for services such as unemployment insurance, licensing, etc.), various branches of the U.S. military, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), numerous airports, the General Services Administration, U.S. Transportation Security Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Nextel, and Telefonica of Spain.

Unisys systems are used for many industrial and government purposes, including banking, check processing, income tax processing, airline passenger reservations, biometric identification, newspaper content management and shipping port management, as well as providing weather data services.Unisys developed the software for NEXRAD, the original doppler weather radar, and has since provided weather data consisting of radar, satellite, lightning, etc.[9] Unisys operates the world's largest RFID network for the U.S. military, tracking 9 million containers yearly to 1,500 nodes in 25 countries. It also created the universal identification card for citizens of South Africa.

The company engages in consulting, one-time contract jobs, and contracts for ongoing outsourced IT services. Services include building and integrating hardware and software systems, providing ongoing hosting and management of data, Business Processing Outsourcing, outsourced help desks and End User Services, Secure Cloud, planning operational processes and changes, and providing security services.[citation needed]

Its equipment line includes the ES7000 server family, which uses Intel processors such as Xeon or Itanium chips. The servers run Microsoft's Windows Datacenter and other Windows operating systems, and/or open source Linux operating systems from Novell or Red Hat. The ES7000 is also certified by the Guinness Book of World Records for hosting the largest number of concurrent gamers ever recorded on a single game server.[10]

The company's mainframe line, Clearpath, is capable of running not only mainframe software, but both the Java platform and the JBoss Java EE Application Server concurrently. The Clearpath system is available in either a UNISYS 2200-based system (Sperry) or an MCP-based system (Burroughs).[citation needed]

Unisys also partners with Aternity Inc.[11] to provide clients with a User-Centric_Proactive_IT_Management[12] solution, called the Frontline Performance Intelligence Platform[13] that delivers significant cost reductions, improved user productivity and customer satisfaction, by proactively driving faults and incidents out of the system.  Through this partnership, Unisys is making comprehensive end-user experience management a strategic component of its outsourcing and support services.

Controversies

Unisys attracted significant criticism in 1994 after announcing its patent on the LZW data compression algorithm, which is used in the common GIF image file format. For a more complete discussion of this issue, see Graphics Interchange Format#Unisys and LZW patent enforcement.

Unisys was the target of "Operation Ill Wind", a major corruption investigation in the mid-to-late-1980s. A number of employees were imprisoned as a result. As part of the settlement, all Unisys employees were required to receive ethics training each year, a practice that continues today.[citation needed]

In 2003 and 2004, Unisys retained influential lobbyist Jack Abramoff, paying his firm $640,000 for his services in those two years. In January 2006, Abramoff pleaded guilty to five felony counts for various crimes related to his federal lobbying activities, though none of his crimes involved work on behalf of Unisys.[14] The lobbying activities of Abramoff and his associates are now the subject of a large federal investigation.

In October 2005, the Washington Post reported that the company had allegedly overbilled on the $1 to 3 billion Transportation Security Administration contract for almost 171,000 hours of labor and overtime at up to the maximum rate of $131.13 per hour including 24,983 hours not allowed by the contract. Unisys denied wrongdoing.[15]

In 2006, the Washington Post reported that the FBI was investigating Unisys for alleged cybersecurity lapses under the company's contract with the United States Department of Homeland Security. A number of security lapses supposedly occurred during the contract, including incidents in which data was transmitted to Chinese servers.[16] Unisys denies all charges and said it has documentation disproving the allegations.[17]

In 2007, after 3 years of massive losses and consecutive losing quarters, Unisys spun off one their service divisions to remain in business. The retirement of Larry Weinbach leaves the company in a chain of losing quarters. Its Blue Bell Headquarters is auctioned [18] to help prop up cash flow. Other cost cutting measures include employees' mileage reimbursements limited and wages frozen. Also the 401K matches were suspended.{ [19]

In 2008 Joe McGrath stepped down after a no confidence vote from the board, and was replaced by J. Edward Coleman, former CEO of Gateway, Inc. The president of the Federal sector Greg Baroni was also fired.[20]

Unisys announced on June 30, 2008 that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) had not selected the company for Phase 2 of procurement for the Information Technology Infrastructure Program.[21] In July Unisys announced its plans to file a formal protest of the TSA decision with the Government Accountability Office (GAO).[22] On August 20 the TSA announced it was allowing bidding from all competitors including Unisys and Northrop Grumman, who both filed formal protests with the GAO and protested TSA's decision to the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Dispute Resolution, after not initially being selected.[23]

Late 2008, the company has been in a continuous period of cost-shedding, including benefits cuts and a number of layoffs. The workforce is now down to under 26,000 from a peak of 120,000, a loss of more than 78%.[24]

2009: Unisys Boasts about firing American workers; "We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India" (Richard Marcello, president of technology, consulting, and integration solutions)[25] The company completed a one-for-ten reverse stock split in October 2009 in an attempt to prop up stock prices and fend off delisting.[26]

2010: Unisys sold its Medicare-processing Health Information Management service to Molina Healthcare for $135 million.[27]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b http://www.unisys.com/unisys/news/detail.jsp?id=1120000970001210084
  2. ^ "Company Profile for UNISYS Corp (UIS)". Retrieved 2010-07-21.
  3. ^ "4th Quarter 2006" (PDF). Unisys. 2006.
  4. ^ "Blue Bell CDP, Pennsylvania". U.S. Census Bureau.
  5. ^ "Company Information: UNISYS CORP". U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
  6. ^ "About Unisys". Unisys.
  7. ^ "People's United to replace Unisys on S&P 500 Index". Reuters. 10 Nov., 2008. Retrieved 2008-11-10. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  8. ^ "Investors". Unisys. {{cite news}}: Text "News, Events, Financials, Information" ignored (help)
  9. ^ "Unisys Weather". Unisys. 11 Feb., 2010. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  10. ^ "Unisys ES7000 Server Powers World-Record-Breaking Gaming Event". Unisys.
  11. ^ "Global Partners". Aternity.
  12. ^ enduserexperience.info (2010-07). "What is End-User Experience?". {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  13. ^ "Unisys Selects Aternity to Provide Clients with Proactive IT Management". DABCC.com. 2009-10-14.
  14. ^ "Abramoff Scandal Could Cast Pall On Tech Lobby". eWeek. 13 Jan. 2006. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Unknown parameter |name= ignored (help)
  15. ^ O'Harrow Jr, Robert; Higham, Scott (22 Oct. 2005). "Contractor Accused Of Overbilling U.S". Washington Post. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  16. ^ "FBI investigates Unisys over U.S. government hack". IT World.
  17. ^ "Unisys Says Facts, Documentation Contradict Allegations in News Story on DHS". Unisys.
  18. ^ http://www.allbusiness.com/real-estate/commercial-residential-property-commercial/10590921-1.html
  19. ^ http://www.workforce.com/section/00/article/26/17/17.php
  20. ^ http://www.washingtontechnology.com/online/1_1/33665-1.html?topic=&CMP=OTC-RSS
  21. ^ "Unisys not selected for next phase of TSA contract". Philadelphia Business Journal. 30 June 2008.
  22. ^ "Unisys files protest over TSA down-select". Washington Technology. 10 July 2008. {{cite news}}: Unknown parameter |name= ignored (help)
  23. ^ "TSA lets Unisys, Northrop back into the mix". Federal News Radio. 20 August 2008.
  24. ^ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/23/unisys_layoffs/
  25. ^ http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/110309-unisys-official-says-cloud-computing.html
  26. ^ "Unisys Board Approves One-for-Ten Reverse Stock Split". Unisys. 6 October 2009.
  27. ^ "Unisys jettisons Medicare processing biz". The Register. 19 January 2010.
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