Buying Cambridge and Netmarks: the turn to services (2006)

Buy at the edges, rearrange on the inside

What moved first in this turn was not the goods it sold but the placement of its companies. Upstream consulting was filled by buying Cambridge, network construction by buying Netmarks; operations and maintenance were gathered into UNIADEX, and regional development was bundled under USOL Holdings. What remained inside Nihon Unisys itself was the point of contact with the customer and the role of deciding which function should sit where. With equipment sales thinning, the mark of this decision is that the outline of the organization was redrawn before the things it had to sell were.

There was strain in the way it bought. Netmarks was carrying serious doubt over four prior years of accounts, and became a consolidated subsidiary while the audit was still unfinished. Its name disappeared in August 2012, absorbed into UNIADEX. The network engineers and customers bought for $79M (¥9bn) dissolved into the group without leaving the name behind. Revenue from the outsourcing business reached $605.4M (¥91bn) in the year ended March 2025 — eighteen years after the tender offer.