Unisys: "Our security solutions is what sets us apart"
Unisys Corporation, the Pennsylvania, USA, headquartered company, along with IBM was the original mainframe champion before mainframes became largely redundant.
- Feb 12, 2018,
- Updated Feb 12, 2018 5:35 PM IST
Unisys Corporation, the Pennsylvania, USA, headquartered company, along with IBM was the original mainframe champion before mainframes became largely redundant. Unisys has a hoary history going back 144 years, having existed in one form or the other, much before even computers were invented. Even today it gets nearly half of its revenues from governments and counts the likes of US government agencies like FBI and CIA amongst its clients.
In the recent past Unisys has morphed itself as a software services player and this has accelerated under Peter Altabef an industry veteran who became President and CEO of the company in 2015. Unisys which in 2016 had revenues of $2.8 billion, has a large India operations which employs about a quarter of its global workforce. Altabef spoke to Venkatesha Babu of Business Today on a recent visit. Edited Excerpts from the conversation.
Peter: And we have rebalanced. In the past 3 years. Unisys is an interesting company. If you look at the work we work do by sector 46% of our revenue is with the governments around the world. Of the 46 about 20% is with the US federal government. About 26 is with other governments. So that's US state and local well as international. So, when you have 46% of your work with governments, some governments like the US federal will really insist you having your people onshore.
Other governments will be more welcoming to have work done offshore. But none of the governments is going to say you can have all of it in low cost locations. So, the fact that 46 % of our revenue is with government's means you could expect even when we have a fully mature knowledge. We have a lower if you will low cost percentage. However, within those limitations we have increased the number of people in more low cost geo's, I would say probably from an approximately from 36% to a 43% and I think that is a significant change.
So will we get to the same percentage as companies that are totally focused on the commercial market place? No we can't. But we have made progress and I think as you would expect we are looking at this, and asking, what is the right mix for us. Globally we have about 21,000 people around the world and of that about 4,500 are in India.
We consider the Indian marketplace as a very attractive one. We now are really focused on the Indian market as it is big with lot of competition now. And our approach, like the approach for the rest of the company is, do not try to do everything, be very distinctive about what you do and do it well. A good example would be travel and transportation, Air India is a client of ours and we are aggressively pursuing other travel and transportation opportunities.
We have a whole sweep of products that are globally effective, we are very significant in the Chinese marketplace as well as in Asia-pacific, US, Europe and Latin America. There is no reason why we cannot build on it in India. SAP is another client we have had around the world, but last year we started to support Indian SAP operations. Companies like Microsoft, we support around the world and we do that support from India, but now we are actually helping Microsoft grow their Indian revenues.
Apart from that we work with likes of HUL, ICICI and others. So, I would tell you, that we are very focussed and are optimistic about the India market opportunity.
Unisys Corporation, the Pennsylvania, USA, headquartered company, along with IBM was the original mainframe champion before mainframes became largely redundant. Unisys has a hoary history going back 144 years, having existed in one form or the other, much before even computers were invented. Even today it gets nearly half of its revenues from governments and counts the likes of US government agencies like FBI and CIA amongst its clients.
In the recent past Unisys has morphed itself as a software services player and this has accelerated under Peter Altabef an industry veteran who became President and CEO of the company in 2015. Unisys which in 2016 had revenues of $2.8 billion, has a large India operations which employs about a quarter of its global workforce. Altabef spoke to Venkatesha Babu of Business Today on a recent visit. Edited Excerpts from the conversation.
Peter: And we have rebalanced. In the past 3 years. Unisys is an interesting company. If you look at the work we work do by sector 46% of our revenue is with the governments around the world. Of the 46 about 20% is with the US federal government. About 26 is with other governments. So that's US state and local well as international. So, when you have 46% of your work with governments, some governments like the US federal will really insist you having your people onshore.
Other governments will be more welcoming to have work done offshore. But none of the governments is going to say you can have all of it in low cost locations. So, the fact that 46 % of our revenue is with government's means you could expect even when we have a fully mature knowledge. We have a lower if you will low cost percentage. However, within those limitations we have increased the number of people in more low cost geo's, I would say probably from an approximately from 36% to a 43% and I think that is a significant change.
So will we get to the same percentage as companies that are totally focused on the commercial market place? No we can't. But we have made progress and I think as you would expect we are looking at this, and asking, what is the right mix for us. Globally we have about 21,000 people around the world and of that about 4,500 are in India.
We consider the Indian marketplace as a very attractive one. We now are really focused on the Indian market as it is big with lot of competition now. And our approach, like the approach for the rest of the company is, do not try to do everything, be very distinctive about what you do and do it well. A good example would be travel and transportation, Air India is a client of ours and we are aggressively pursuing other travel and transportation opportunities.
We have a whole sweep of products that are globally effective, we are very significant in the Chinese marketplace as well as in Asia-pacific, US, Europe and Latin America. There is no reason why we cannot build on it in India. SAP is another client we have had around the world, but last year we started to support Indian SAP operations. Companies like Microsoft, we support around the world and we do that support from India, but now we are actually helping Microsoft grow their Indian revenues.
Apart from that we work with likes of HUL, ICICI and others. So, I would tell you, that we are very focussed and are optimistic about the India market opportunity.