News
Unisys Begins to Eliminate Positions
- By Scott Bekker
- 12/08/2000
Plagued by two consecutive quarters of poor financial
performance,
Unisys Corp. began to follow
through with its plans to cut its workforce by 2,000.
On Thursday, the Blue Bell, Pa.-based computer company
announced that 750 U.S. employees have accepted a previously announced early
retirement program. The other 1,250 positions will be eliminated through
worldwide involuntary reductions, most of which will come by the end of the
month.
After posting lower-than expected second-quarter financial
results, Unisys saw its third-quarter profits plunge from $138.4 million in
1999 to 42.9 million in 2000, a 69 percent decrease from the year-earlier
period. Following this, Unisys announced it would be eliminating positions and
said that other changes were in the work. Some of those changes could involve
its federal computer services division, which Unisys revealed it is considering
selling.
The
reduction in workforce does not appear to affect Unisys’s 32-processor servers,
however, evidenced by the fact that Unisys recently launched its e-@ction
ES7000 Enterprise Server program with Dell
Computer Corp. earlier in the week. Through this program, Dell will resell
Unisys’ ES7000 32-way Pentium server, becoming the third of the four major PC
vendors (Compaq and HP being the others) to resell the ES7000. Unisys will also
aid Dell’s initiative to develop an enterprise worthy consulting organization. –
Jim Martin
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.