Dear Editor,
Please note: I am not a Corporate Communications person, and am not authorized to speak for Unisys as such. However, when I read one of your Barbed Wire articles today, titled The Lost Company: the story of a failed acquisition (CI No 3,373). I felt I had to contact you with this feedback. This article talks of the Unisys acquisition of USoft and the consequences thereof, in unkind but (I fear) probably fairly accurate terms. However, in the last paragraph, an ex-employee of ours, Mr Ney, is quoted as saying, After all, Unisys had had four adventures in software tools: LINC, Mapper, Ally and USoft – and made a mess of all four. This seems to me, as a consultant and practitioner with two of the tools he mentions, to be a gross misrepresentation. While there are no inaccuracies that I’m aware of in the way you describe the USoft story, and Ally certainly never took off as it deserved to, nevertheless LINC and MAPPER are amongst the most successful 4GL tools in the industry, with thousands of licenses for each, and are very heavily used. They have achieved penetration rates of around 80% in their target parts of our user base, and are lively and profitable products, which continue to gain new business for us. Mr Ney’s quote seems to imply that they are dead. (Unisys *had* had four adventures…), which they most certainly are not; and it is difficult to see how such successful products can be described as a mess.
Regards
Colin Zealley
