Blue Bell, Pennsylvania-based Unisys Corp’s acquisition of Amsterdam-based TopSystems International NV (CI No 2,602) is part of the company’s attempt to find new markets and prevent the dwindling of its revenues continuing. Unisys has renamed the now wholly-owned subsidiary USoft Inc and installed Michael Seashols, a former vice-president of sales and marketing at Oracle Corp, as president. Co-founder of TopSystems Max ten Dam becomes USoft Europe’s managing director. Unisys will invest ú50m in USoft over the next two to three years. This sum includes the purchase price which Unisys has not disclosed, but last year TopSystems did around $10m, up from 1993 revenues of $6.5m. Unisys, on the other hand, has seen its revenue slump: in 1994 turnover fell 1% to $1,788m and profits fell 49%. The weak spots were its government systems division, the general move by customers from proprietary to open systems and the rise in the cost of selling. Also its European markets have been slower in coming out of recession than the company expected. The one bright spot has been its information services business, which has grown and is now Unisys’ single biggest revenue generator, accounting for 25% of turnover. Last summer chairman James Unruh said Unisys was looking to this business sector to reverse its fortunes, but for a company that was founded with the target of becoming a $20,000m-a-year firm, Unisys has clearly rethought how it is going to achieve this, and information services is just one part of a three-pronged attempt at a financial renaissance. The other two tines are hardware and services for the client-server market in an attempt to retain its customer base even if it change systems; and software, but Unisys, for the sake of speed to market, has decided not to develop applications itself but buy a company with the type of tools it liked, hence the purchase of TopSystems, which had already been selling TopWindows, a client-server development tool, for the last two years. TopWindows has been renamed USoft Developer.
Not sell any Unisys products
USoft will function as an independent company and will not sell any Unisys products. Part of the $50m Unisys is investing will go on new headquarters in Brisbane, California; some will be spent on offices elsewhere but Amsterdam will remain the engineering and development hub; research and development spending will be doubled to around $5m a year; new staff will be hired; and a considerable chunk will be spent on marketing, given that TopWindows and TopSystems have a next to non-existent profile. USoft’s marketing ploy is that USoft Developer is not a client-server tool but a server-client tool, which it defines as one that drives application design from the database server to the client, not the other way around. The developer creates a business model, replete with desired business rules, which sits in a repository and both server and client ends are generated from that with the tool automatically partitioning the two components. On the server side, database structure, database forms, triggers, stored procedures and SQL statements are all automatically generated. USoft says this makes the tool fast and easy to use, and scalable across the enterprise; it boasts a 1,000-user site at NEC Corp’s offices in Reading, Berkshire. As for the finished product, it says that as there is no coding involved, what sits on the client is basically the repository, which makes the client ‘intelligent’ – the client understands everything about the application that has been created and need not make calls to the server, says USoft. USoft has calculated that it reduces network traffic by 60% so that more clients can be added to a server. And USoft claims that because everything is based on the server with a single definition of the business model, the tool makes applications highly adaptable, changes can be made in the repository and propagated automatically throughout the application. USoft Developer works with the usual Unix databases – Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres and Open Database
Connectivity-compliant databases; and Windows, Windows NT and X Window clients. There is also a batch repository facility to drive batch processing. USoft Developer is ú5,500 per user and ú300 for a run-time licence, considerably less than development tools from Forte Software Inc and Dynasty Technology Inc. Developments planned by USoft include transaction processing extensions: USoft wants to push the product up to the thousand of users level. Other work will centre on decision support and distributed systems management; while USoft plans to develop much of it, it is also prepared to buy technology.
