Unisys Corporation

History

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 after an internal competition. 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. 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.

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 desktop mainframe, the UNISYS ES7000 servers in 2000, and the 3D-Visual Enterprise (3D-VE) method of visualizing business rules and workflow in 2004.
In 1988 the company acquired Convergent Technologies, makers of CTOS.
In March 2006, Unisys sold its Japanese distributor stake for $374 million. The sale was intended to help fund 3,600 previously announced employee layoffs, accounting for about 10% of the Unisys employee workforce at that time.

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 2006, the ratio was 83% for services, up from 65% in 1997.
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 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 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, planning operational processes and changes, and providing security.

Its equipment line includes the ES7000 server family, which uses Intel processors such as Xeon or Itanium chips. The servers run Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, or Open source Linux operating systems from Novell or Red Hat.
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).

Community and environment

Unisys was named the industry leader for corporate sustainability (including environmental, social, financial, human resources, and corporate governance factors) in the Computer Services & Internet industry.
Unisys has a 100% rating from the Human Rights Campaign for its policies regarding LGBT employees.

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