Business Tech

Unisys on Tuesday announced that it has named J. Edward Coleman as its new chief executive.

J. Edward Coleman

(Credit: Gateway)

Coleman will take on the roles of chairman and CEO. He replaces Joseph McGrath, who served as CEO for the past three years, and whose departure was announced last month. Henry Duques will step down from his position as chairman of the company's board but will become lead director instead.

In a statement, Unisys touted Coleman as a master of corporate transformations and turnarounds. Most recently, he served as CEO of Gateway for a little more than a year. In that short amount of time, he managed to work out a deal with Acer to buy the troubled PC maker. He has more than 30 years' experience in the IT industry and has held executive positions at CompuCom and Arrow Electronics.

"(Coleman) has a strong track record of helping IT companies successfully narrow their business focus and build on core strengths to drive revenue and earnings growth," Unisys' statement said. "Throughout his career, he has shown himself able to drive change from vision to execution, with a proven focus on operational improvement."

He'll have his work cut out for him. For most of the year, Unisys' stock has stayed below the $5 mark, and the company has faced declining revenues.

Moments after Hewlett-Packard announced plans Monday to chop more than 24,000 jobs, Chief Executive Mark Hurd defended the company's purchase of EDS, saying it will help the company in the long term.

"The enterprise is big," Hurd said at a meeting with financial analysts. "It's attractive for us and it's heading our way."

As for the integration of EDS, Hurd noted that HP has a history of being able to digest large companies. HP announced plans in May to acquire the computer services firm for $13.9 billion. The deal closed in August.

"We bought 30 companies in the past four years," he said. "We're good at it."

Although the headlines were sure to focus on the job cuts, which will take place over the next three years, Hurd said the deal's benefits were not limited to cutting jobs. "I can assure you there are other synergies we are looking for in the acquisition," Hurd said.

Following Hurd, HP executive Ann Livermore talked up how the combined companies' services and products lineup. In HP's own house, Livermore noted that the company is doing internally what it hopes to do for customers.

In fiscal year 2005, Livermore noted that it had more people working in IT than it did in its sales force as well as too many applications.

"We had a real spaghetti bowl of things," she said. By the end of fiscal year 2009, Livermore said it will have twice as many customer-related staff as it will in IT as well as getting far more computing power, despite having reduced its total number of servers.

Hurd kicked off the meeting with a reference to the bloodbath on Wall Street that took place earlier Monday after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch announced a hastily put together plan to sell to Bank of America.

"That was a tough day on Wall street," Hurd said. "I hope there's a chance I can capture your attention."

Update: CFO Cathie Lesjak told analysts that the company expects to make about half of the job cuts to be made by the end of fiscal year 2009, spread out roughly evenly over the year.

Although it plans to eliminate more than 24,000 jobs overall, Lesjak said that the company expects to reinvest some of those savings, ultimately adding back about half the number of of jobs being lost in other areas.

"We need to get the EDS cost structure more competitive," she said.

Hewlett-Packard on Monday announced plans to cut tens of thousands of jobs over the next three years as it digests its recent purchase of EDS.

The company expects to replace roughly half of these positions over the next three years to create a global workforce that has the right blend of service delivery capabilities to address the diversity of its markets and customers worldwide.

HP announced plans in May to acquire the computer services firm for $13.9 billion. The deal closed in August. The company said that, once it has finished with the cuts, it expects the moves to save $1.8 billion in costs annually. It said it does plan to reinvest in other areas.

On the accounting side, HP said it will record a $1.7 billion charge in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008 related to the restructuring program. The company said that, of that charge, $1.4 billion will be recorded as goodwill, and $300 million will be recorded as a restructuring charge that will be included in its financial results.

The company positioned the announcement as part of an effort to "streamline" its costs. It plans to discuss the move at an analysts' meeting, set to kick off shortly.

"HP now has the broadest technology capabilities in the market to meet customer needs today and in the future," CEO Mark Hurd said in a statement. "HP has a strong track record of making acquisitions and integrating them to capture leading market positions. We will deliver on the promise of HP and EDS for our customers and shareholders." HP discussed the job cuts as part of a meeting under way for financial analysts.

Hewlett-Packard completed on Tuesday its mega-acquisition of computer services giant EDS.

The deal, worth about $13.9 billion when it was first announced in May, is among the largest in the technology industry. It's also the second largest one for HP since its acquisition of Compaq was completed in 2002.

HP executives have said they are buying EDS to expand HP's business beyond traditional computing and printers. HP has been trying to develop its software and services business over the last few years. EDS adds a service component that will help the company compete head-to-head with IBM.

Annual revenue for HP and EDS, combined, in fiscal 2007 was more than $38 billion with 210,000 employees between them operating in more than 80 countries.

But bigger doesn't always mean better. Merging the companies' businesses and cultures won't be easy. And once the combined company manages to get through the integration, some experts say it still has a long, tough road ahead of it as it tries to compete with IBM.

Under the deal, EDS will operate a new business unit, which will be called EDS. It will continue to be led by EDS' current CEO, Ronald Rittenmeyer.

The deal has had the support of HP shareholders from the beginning. It won approval from U.S. antitrust authorities on June 30 and passed muster with European regulators on July 26.

Microsoft announced on Monday plans to track Australian delegates attending its annual Tech.Ed conference in Sydney using RFID tags embedded in conference badges.

Until now in Australia, human-targeted deployments of RFID tags have largely been limited to state prison systems. ACT Corrective Services said earlier this year that it had commissioned U.S. RFID provider Alanco and NEC Australia to install a Wi-Fi-compatible inmate-tracking system within its walls.

Microsoft's experiment will take place over the five days of next week's conference, although it could involve a relatively large sample size. The conference typically attracts no fewer than 1,000 delegates.

The software giant will allow delegates to opt out of the tracking experiment, but they will be enticed to participate with the offer of greater access to conference information. Delegates who opt out will have standard barcodes printed on their badges instead.

The benefits promoted to delegates to partake in the RFID tag experiment include access to real-time information on when sessions are filling up, the ability to see what sessions others are interested in, and tracking where Microsoft so-called most valuable players and regional directors are located.

Microsoft will also track sessions that each delegate attends and will use that information to customize sessions, the company said in a statement. It will also send delegates an instant record of what sessions they have attended.

The RFID tracking system took just three weeks to build and deploy, according to Microsoft.

Research firm IDC has predicted that use of RFID tags by business will rise by 122 percent in 2009. The track and trace chips were used in 8 percent of companies last year, while 18 percent of them expect to use them in 2009.

Microsoft was not immediately available to comment.

The move comes months after 50 academics, researchers and students at the University of Washington began an unrelated social-networking experiment, in which participants voluntarily tag themselves. The system records the location of tags every five seconds and publishes movements to a Web page.

Liam Tung of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

A proposed acquisition by Hewlett-Packard of computer services company EDS has won approval from the European Commission.

In May, HP announced it would buy EDS for $25 per share, or $13.9 billion. Under the deal, EDS will operate as a new business unit (called EDS) and will continue to be led by Ronald A. Rittenmeyer, its current chief executive officer. The EDS buy will pit HP squarely against IBM and make it second only to Big Blue in the realm of outsourced computer services.

But the enormity of the merged companies and culture differences between the two groups will make this acquisition challenging, Gartner analyst Ben Pring said at the time it was announced.

The deal won approval from U.S. antitrust authorities on June 30.