Peter Altabef, president and CEO at Unisys Corporation, said a mouthful on cybersecurity during the tech firms's Q1 2016 earnings call last week, which is transcribed by Seeking Alpha.
Altabef has been talking up Unisys Stealth -- a cybersecurity product lineup which provides protection around the cloud, data centers, corporate networks and their endpoints, and mobile devices -- plus identity access and management (IAM), and security analytics.
Cyber protection has moved front and center to Unisys' entire business strategy, according to its CEO. "Our goal is to distinguish Unisys through a focused effort to build leading security protocols into all of our solutions company-wide" said Altabef. "Security itself is going to be something we are going to be discussing and showing our clients in everything we do."
A day before the earnings call, Unisys announced a deal with Unified Communications provider Mitel to offer Unisys Stealth to protect Mitel's 60 million mobile and enterprise customers.
With Unisys' revenue declining by 3% -- and its services declining by 2% -- in the first quarter of 2016, and its technology business being what the company describes as "lumpy" quarter-to-quarter - a stronger focus around its Stealth products and the hyper-growth cyber opportunity is a smart move.
The worldwide cybersecurity market is expected to grow from $75 billion in 2015 to $170 billion by 2020. Juniper Research recently predicted that the rapid digitization of consumers’ lives and enterprise records will increase the cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion globally by 2019, increasing to almost four times the estimated cost of breaches in 2015.
Will Unisys successfully launch its security business into cyberspace, or will it come crashing down? That remains to be seen. The early trajectory looks good -- with the CEO squarely on-board, and a comprehensive end-to-end cyber product suite.
One challenge for Unisys - which Altabef acknowledged on the earnings call -- is defining Unisys' security business in a way that analysts and the market can fully understand it. He said that the company is working really hard to figure out how to define its security business.
Another challenge will be going up against tech superpowers
Finally, Unisys faces stiff competition from the world's largest pure-play cybersecurity companies -- which include
If the Unisys security business makes it to orbit, then the Unisys stock may lift off behind it.
Visit SteveOnCyber.com to read all of my blogs and articles covering cybersecurity.
Follow me on Twitter @CybersecuritySF or connect with me on LinkedIn. Send story tips, feedback, and suggestions to me here.
