Unisys’ application development tools ‘experiment’, Usoft Corp, has finally come to an end. As our sister publication Computer Business Review reported earlier this year (CI No 3,373), USoft’s managers, under the stewardship of CEO Mike Seashols, gained industry-wide fame for burning their way through as much as $70m of Unisys’ money over two and a half years, with little or nothing to show for it. Their aim was to take a toolset from Dutch software company TopSystems International NV, a product that had been highly-successful when used as part of a consultancy project, and shrink-wrap and brand it for the US and wider European markets. The US operation fizzled out almost completely earlier this year and operations in Europe are now scaled back to just a handful of countries. But USoft may have a third life. Israeli company Advanced Technology Ltd stepped in last month to take USoft technology back to its ‘consultancy- sell’ roots. As the $48m IT consultancy, systems integration and software arm of the Tadiran Group, a $1.1bn Israeli electronics company, ATL intends to establish USoft as an independent subsidiary run out of Tel Aviv, but with research and development remaining in Holland. They are, however, unlikely to revive the ‘Server/Client’ marketing tag that made the company something of a laughing stock.
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