Unisys wins defense financial management contract

Unisys Corp. has won a contract from the Defense Department's Finance and Accounting Service to provide managed desktop services worth a potential $83.5 million if all options are exercised and all services are ordered, the company said today.

The contract was awarded under the Millennia vehicle, a governmentwide acquisition program for information technology services. Unisys is one of the nine companies qualified to bid on Millennia contracts.

Unisys' contract is for five months with five one-year options that the Defense Finance and Accounting Service may exercise at its discretion.

The program will start with a pilot implementation at three locations, with a complete rollout to approximately 15,000 employees worldwide over two years. The Finance and Accounting Service has ordered around $1 million of services to date in connection with the pilot program.

"With increasing budget constraints and a need to make government more efficient, federal agencies are under enormous pressure to reduce costs and increase productivity," said Ira Kirsch, president of Unisys' federal government group. In working with Unisys, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service "will be able to focus less on technology and more on its core business: paying defense employee salaries and disbursing federal money globally," he said.

The service issues payments for nearly 6 million defense employees, retirees and annuitants; processes more than 12 million invoices and disburses more than $416 billion annually.

Blue Bell, Pa.-based Unisys provides worldwide IT services and solutions and ranks No. 28 on Washington Technology's Top 100 list of federal prime contractors. It employs 37,000 workers and had annual revenue of $5.9 billion in 2003.