Personality Profile: Frank Brandenberg Builds Unisys Client/Server Line

Growing up in Detroit, he was more interested in cars

                      Name: Frank Brandenberg
                       Age: 48
            Place of Birth: Brooklyn, N.Y.
          Current Position: Vice President, Unisys Corp., and President,
                            Unisys Client/Server Systems
 Years in Current Position: 1
     Years in the Industry: 27
            Cars He Drives: 1991 Ford Taurus, 1966 Corvette, and 1965 Mustang
Favorite Non-Work Activity: Renovating American muscle cars.
    Pet Open Systems Peeve: "My pet peeve is probably over with now.
It was the way people conveniently bragged about the capabilities
and flexibility you had with open systems, and that it really
wasn't there. Open systems was superior in many ways to the old
glass house. But although it was superior, along came some inferior
things. People just bought hardware because it gave them some
local flexibility, and that was great, but then they realized
they couldn't manage it. So Unisys dabbled. I think you're going
to see us explode in the second generation of client/server.
I think the world is realizing that the second generation is
a lot more sophisticated."

As a typical teenager in suburban Detroit in the 1960s, Frank Brandenberg worked on cars in his spare time. American cars. "My dad was a machine shop owner, so I liked making things," Brandenberg says. "I thought this whole idea of designing something and making it and people buying it was an amazing thing."

So he went to Wayne State University in Detroit and majored in industrial engineering, thinking he would some day work for a car company or in some other heavy industry. For two summers, he worked in automobile plants. One day close to graduation, starting to hitchhike home, he ducked into a building to get out of a heavy rainstorm. There, he found an ex-Detroit Tiger pitcher handing out employment applications for Burroughs Corp. "I filled out the application and never thought any more about it," Brandenberg said. Before long Brandenberg had an offer and went to work for Burroughs, which even had a nice machine shop or two. "The automobile companies I'd worked for didn't demonstrate to me that they were progressive," he says. "This was a company where it seemed that if you had ideas, you could effectively do work even if you were a new employee." Thus began Brandenberg's career with Burroughs, later Unisys Corp., where today he is a corporate vice president and president of the client/server systems business unit in San Jose, CA.

Started with Burroughs

Starting as a management systems analyst at the Plymouth, MI, plant-where Burroughs made printers, card readers, card punchers, and document sorters-Brandenberg was happy with his job. "If you had an idea, factory management would allow you to make changes and help you," he says. "It was just a fantastic environment. You could effect change and it was very gratifying for a person to have an impact on a huge corporation quickly."

Then, at age 24, Brandenberg got a sudden promotion. "The plant manager came up to my desk one day and said, 'Frank.' I had never talked to the guy. In those days the plant managers were the guys with the big cigars, and if you didn't like what they had to say, they met you in back of the plant after work. It was a very macho environment with heavy metal and unions in Detroit-a gritty type of environment. It shocked me that he walked up to my desk and addressed me. He said, 'You're the plant superintendent.' I said, 'What?' and everybody was kind of snickering. I was trying to figure out why he was making fun of me, and he wasn't. He made me the plant superintendent. I was sitting there, barely able to manage myself, managing several hundred people in a Teamster/UAW union shop."

After two more years, he was given a line of accounting machines, for which he managed engineering and manufacturing. Two years later, he was sent to the corporate headquarters manufacturing staff, where he had coordinating responsibility for manufacturing in Europe, South America, and the Middle East. He coordinated the construction of a factory in India and worked in Brazil. In 1978, for a year, he was general manager of the company's Villers-Ecalles factory in France. He returned to the United States to help his parents when they became ill, then in 1981 was named general manager of the Burroughs printer and workstation systems plant in Flemington, NJ. At the time, the workstations were only terminals for Burroughs mainframes, but that changed after Brandenberg met Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. "I thought it would be really neat to have high-performance mainframe terminals with DOS and multiple productivity capability on the same product. So we did that." Then, after a search for small business applications, Burroughs added CTOS, the distributed operating system it acquired from its purchase of Convergent Technologies. CTOS was considered advantageous for departmental computing and was added to Burroughs' ergonomic terminal line, sending its terminal business soaring. Brandenberg set the factory to producing automatic teller machines when production got lighter. In his three-year tenure, the Flemington plant went from $70 million to $700 million a year in production. "At that time we thought we were really hot stuff," he says. "But in the early '80s, anybody doing quality desktop products would have experienced growth. We had people that knew how to put together some very quality, reliable hardware," he says.

In 1984, Brandenberg was sent to Harvard for an intensive 16-week management course, then returned to Detroit. "I had kind of a weird set of jobs for about six or seven months, then they asked me to be a group executive to run a number of factories," he says. First he managed the workstation products group, then the financial products group, Burroughs' largest business line, consisting of teller stations, check processing, and various encoding products. "[Then-President and CEO Mike] Blumenthal asked me to jump out of workstations and go into financial products, which I really didn't want to do because workstations were exciting," Brandenberg says. "But they can be persuasive."

After the Merger

Then, in 1985, Burroughs merged with Sperry and became Unisys, resulting in the merging of many product lines and the resulting jockeying for position. However, since Sperry had no financial products, Brandenberg found himself with a lot of autonomy. "Besides setting up some very nice engineering and manufacturing processes that guarantee high-quality products, we got into check imaging technology. Although we had substantially smaller resources, we beat IBM to market with high-speed check imaging and have benefited from that technology."

Over time, the company added software reproduction, storage products and other operations to his group, resulting in its being renamed the diversified products group. In 1990, Brandenberg was awarded the Unisys Pinnacle of Excellence Award, the company's highest award for managers. He was sent to Philadelphia to become a vice president and general manager of the company's computer systems group, which at first built only mainframes, but eventually included everything but client/server products. "The purpose was to take what we learned in workstations and the efficiencies that we created in disk manufacturing and apply that to mainframes," he says. "The idea was for the group of people who had demonstrated the ability to survive on low [profit] margins to go into the big-margin products and improve the efficiency, engineering, manufacturing processes, and marketing. We came up with new delivery methodologies and brought our assets into control and reduced the cost of operations."

In 1994, Brandenberg was appointed to his present position, one that had seen frequent leadership changes. There, he's responsible for a product line that includes everything from PCs to very powerful enterprise-level servers. "I kept seeing the client/server business headquartered in San Jose, as doing some unique things but never quite being successful. In this business, which is accentuated by volume and fast time-to-market, if you don't get everything right, then it's a bleeding disaster. You're either very good or you're no good-there's very little in between because this side of the industry has very little tolerance for mistakes and poor execution."

Boosting PC Sales

Brandenberg's client/server product line includes machines based on DOS, Unix System V release 4, Windows NT, and CTOS. Intel microprocessors are at the heart of the Unisys PC and server hardware. Brandenberg reorganized the business, then set about improving its lagging PC sales. "I didn't want to organize by the traditional product technology, but using a market model," he says. "They had a Unix organization, an NT organization, a DOS organization, and it didn't seem logical to me. I decided to organize by how I do business with the world. How you build a market for a PC is considerably different from how to build a market for servers."

On the PC side, he looked the total amount that its own customers spent on PCs and found Unisys was getting only 3 percent of that business. That's where he put most of his efforts. "Unisys customers buy about $9 billion worth of PCs a year," he says. "At this time a year ago, we were getting about $250 million, or 3 percent of our own installed base." The company was not in the top 20 PC providers. "It seemed like we had an advantage that we were not using."

Reasoning that the market for PCs already existed, Brandenberg figured he needed a good product and a distribution channel. He gave up the company's own PC design effort and came up with Z-Box, a method of product-sourcing, and Build To Customer Order (BCTO), a way of delivering PCs configured to specific customer orders, including software. Components are selected from a list of suppliers and bought in bulk, then assembled close to the delivery point. "It has tremendous leverage on time-to-market and asset management," Brandenberg says. Now Unisys is expanding its PC delivery to more distributors in the United States and China. Unisys has seen a growth of 60 percent from the first quarter if 1994 to the same period in 1995. "This time last year, senior management in the company was convinced that we should get out of the PC business-that we were not going to be able to be profitable. Now [company Chairman James] Unruh will brag about the PC business at Unisys."

NT's Big Future

On the server side, Unisys owned 13 percent of the 1993 market for Unix commercial multiprocessing computers from $100,000 to $1.75 million each, according to CI InfoCorp-about the same share as Stratus, Pyramid, and Hewlett-Packard, the other top companies. Brandenberg puts heavy emphasis on target marketing programs, and instituting processes that keep the U6000 line up to date. Although the servers work with several operating systems, he's convinced Microsoft's Windows NT will become a ubiquitous distributed OS. "NT will be there because that's where all the investment is," he says. "Microsoft has the ability and the wherewithal to invest in operating systems. That cannot be easily matched. That doesn't mean it's going to be the best environment. It's got mind share, it will have investment share, and it has a huge investment capability. So I have to assume that, five years from now, NT will be an environment that any systems provider will have to contend with."

The same principle holds true for processors, Brandenberg believes. "For example, if you take a look at [DEC's] Alpha, PowerPC, RISCs, and Intel, you had to decide that Intel is going to make it because they had a huge investment capability. When you see P6, you're going to see some tremendous power out of Intel. You're going to realize that the $800 million a year that they spend on engineering brings power you can't match easily. Alpha is gone. The only alternative will be PowerPC, and we maintain vigilance over PowerPC and we use it in some products. All other RISC products, Alpha included, are going to go to the wayside."

Brandenberg believes DOS and NT are more open than Unix. "When I was in mainframes I concentrated a great amount of investment in open interoperability, so it's hard to say one system's open and another's not. There are so many flavors of Unix, it's not really an open operating environment like DOS or NT. Those are true open systems. Unix is not an open system. We used to call ourselves the open systems group, but that didn't seem right because my mainframes turned out to be more open than our Unix offerings were."