The former chief executive of Irvine PC maker Gateway Inc. landed a new gig as the top guy at another big tech name with local operations.
Ed Coleman, who stepped down in January after helping to navigate Acer Inc.’s $710 million acquisition of Gateway, is the new chief executive of Blue Bell, Penn.-based Unisys Corp.
Unisys, which makes servers and does technology consulting, has operations in Mission Viejo with some 750 workers.
Coleman, 57, is set to take over for Joseph McGrath, who stepped down last month amid calls by activist shareholders to restructure Unisys’ businesses.
Unisys’ bread and butter is making big mainframe servers for companies and agencies that need to be “on” all the time. They include regional Federal Reserve banks and airlines.
Unisys has seen a string of losses this year. Its shares are off some 70% in the past year.
Unisys once had a bigger operation in OC, counting as many as 1,300 workers. It ranked as the second largest computer products maker in the county in the mid-1990s.
The technology downturn in 2000 hit the local operation hard, bringing local job cuts.
The company has struggled to keep up with the new server technologies made by longtime rivals IBM Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc.
Coleman has a history as a turnaround guy.
At Gateway, where he held the post for a bit more than a year, he dealt with increasing speculation about a buyout, tough going in Gateway’s results, a laptop battery recall and job cuts.
He helped lead Gateway through a year-long restructuring process to get the company out of red ink.
No one has replaced Coleman at Gateway since the buyout, according to spokeswoman Lisa Emard, because Acer’s leaders are spread around the globe.
Its chairman is in its headquarters in Taipei, while its chief executive is in Milan.
A trio of managers at Gateway report to Acer’s Rudi Schmidleithner, who runs the PC maker’s pan-American operations out of its U.S. headquarters in San Jose.
