MB Foster partners with PowerHouse owner
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Unicom casts meet including PowerHouse

Last summer the new owners of PowerHouse invited the customer base, including HP 3000 sites, to a meeting at Unicom Systems company headquarters. At that time, the venerable automated development tool had only been in the Unicom strategy for about five months. Later this month, those users and the PowerHouse Advisory Board will meet again. This time the meeting will span a handful of user bases.

PickFair in 1935The March 27 gathering is at the PickFair mansion in Beverly Hills. That movie-industry icon is also a property of Unicom Global, the parent corporation of Unicom Systems. In the months since the PowerHouse acquisition, Unicom has also purchased the customers and products from four other former IBM operations. The latest, announced at the start of this year, was IBM’s Rational brand, which includes the Focal Point product portfolio and Program Management solution, along with the PurifyPlus dynamic Software Analysis Tools solution.

The scope of these purchases is significant for an enterprise software company. Company officials said the Rational acquisition expanded Unicom’s business by adding more than 2,000 enterprise customers in over 40 countries.

Unicom's 2014 event was for PowerHouse customers exclusively, since the other four IBM properties hadn't been acquired yet. But this month's invitation-only event is being called TeamBLUE, with PowerHouse users joining the Rational customers; users of solidDB, an in-memory relational database; and Unicom Finance, an analysis solution that was called Cognos Finance before Unicom acquired it.

The company said in its backgrounder on the meeting that "TeamBLUE represents a dramatic shift in the approach of leveraging technology assets to deliver leadership in your business, transforming technology discussions into management consulting."

The strategy of viewing software assets as a business element instead of a technology investment will sound familiar to HP 3000 sites. MB Foster's webinars over the last several years have stressed the business fit of a solution being at least as important as any tech issues. As far back as 2007, the Connect user group started to refer to the prior generation of IT decision makers as technologists.

Unicom has been generating a massive customer base over more than three decades of operations. The parent corporation Unicom Global was started by current CEO Corry Hong as a CICS systems software company in 1981. The corporation now counts over 70 million customers in 140 countries. The operations provide enterprise software, hardware, telecom equipment, IT services, real estate, corporate services, M&A and financing services across 37 corporate entities.

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