Unisys New Zealand grew 16% last year, recording sales of $176 million for 2000.
General manager Russell Stanners says 75% of business came from services and 25% from sales of technology.
He says the first half of the year was slow but in the second half the market lifted.
“We all underestimated the slow-down effect of Y2K and the slow uptake of e-business at the beginning," Stanners says. "But after April, when dot.coms became dot.gones, people began to understand that the internet is not a disruptive factor, it is just a technology. Before then bricks and mortar companies were wondering whether they should form a dot.com; they didn’t know what to do. Now we’re back to business as usual. People realise you have to have a business plan and you have to make a profit.”
Stanners says Unisys’ ASP (application service provider) arm, which it launched last June, was financially successful, as was its outsourcing business.
While a massive outsourcing contract with Fletcher Challenge fell over when Fletcher began selling off its divisions, outsourcing deals for Unisys included Clear Communications, ACC and Vodafone. It also renewed outsourcing contracts with the Land Transport Safety Authority, IRD and Fletcher Challenge’s Placemakers.
Other services business included replacing IBM’s OS/2 operating system with Windows NT on Police servers, as well development work for Fisher & Paykel, Fencepost.com (which is owned by Kiwi Dairies), The Warehouse and the Ministry of Economic Development.
Unisys also made sales of its Windows data server, the ES7000, which shipped last year, to Griffins, Foodstuffs and EDS.
Unisys' headcount stands at 600, up from 550 in the previous year, with 30 university graduates hired during 2000.
Stanners says the growth target for 2001 is 10% to 15% although the results will read differently because Unisys has just exited the PC business. It used to rebadge Hewlett-Packard PCs but has partnered with the major PCs vendors, with Dell as its preferred supplier.
Although Unisys is focusing on the high-end Windows market, it will continue to deploy Unix platforms as part of its systems integration work.