About 100 employees in the megacomputer division of Open Parallel Unisys Servers at Unisys Corp., 322 N. 2200 West, could lose their jobs because of the company's plan to close the operation.
Last Friday, Alan Lutz, Unisys Computer Systems Group president, told the workers of the planned closing, which also will impact OPUS workers in Roseville, Minn., and San Jose, Calif.A Unisys spokesman said the company, based in Blue Bell, Pa., will consolidate the division with the Enterprise Service Division in Tredyffrin, Pa. The consolidation will begin immediately and should be complete within a month.
The spokesman said some workers in Salt Lake City may choose to move to Blue Bell. The 100 workers are about 20 percent of the company's work force in Utah.
OPUS was introduced by Unisys in mid-1995 as a way to help revive the company's slumping profits. Unisys, once one of the country's largest computer makers, has struggled in recent years as the market has shifted from mainframe computers to client-server computing.
The market for OPUS never materialized, a company spokesman said, and it isn't profitable enough to warrant its own division. The consolidation means the way OPUS is marketed will be changed. Under the new plan, Unisys will sell OPUS as a platform to companies that will add their own features and resell it, the spokesman said.
Closing the division is part of a larger Unisys reorganization announced in January that came on the heels of a fourth-quarter reporting of a $678.8 million loss, of $4.12 per share. The reorganization is expected to save the company $500 million by the end of 1996 and another $600 million by late 1997.