Job Title: Vice President
Location: PA
Submitted on: 23-May-05
|
|
Job Title |
Business Outlook
Survey |
| Vice President |
The dilemma for Joe McGrath is that the future Unisys must be made up of
A-players in all management slots, and the culture must be a culture of
winning and executing, while the heritage of the company and the culture
of its profit-generating hardware unit are that of D-players (hiring
F-players), risk aversity, and tolerance for poor performance. He can't
unload the cancerous hardware unit because it generates literally all of
the cash flow. He can't really fix it, because no matter what actions
are taken, the mainframe business is a shrinking revenue producer, the
Intel (Windows and Linux) server business is a half-billion-dollar
business (at BEST) in a tough, low-margin business, and it would be
foolish to introduce any other type of hardware into a market where
Unisys is 27th in hardware market share (seriously) in an industry that
has already coalesced into an oligopoly (ref. Sun Microsystems for
evidence that you need to be Top 3 to survive). He can't unload the
services businesses, even though we're losing money, so he has to figure
out how to fix them while he still has mainframe cash with which to do it.
In summary,I see the ONLY way for Unisys to survive as a corporate entity
will be for McGrath to very quickly replace the hardware unit's top
management with people who know how to run a business, shrink the
hardware unit to just do mainframes (i.e. sell or liquidate the Intel
server business, move the storage resale business into the S.I. units,
and cut R&D to a level that keeps the decline of mainframe cash
generation to as slow a decline as possible. He'll also have to put some
savvy operational attention into the outsourcing and infrastructure
services business to make them profitable. Finally, there has to be much
tighter controls placed on the consulting businesses. They need to be
cash-positive in 2006, or McGrath must exit the unprofitable ones.
|
|
Unisys Corporation Interview Surveys
