News

Unisys Begins to Eliminate Positions

• By Scott Bekker
• 12/08/2000

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