Peter Altabef, ’83: A Technology and Business Career Yields a Second-Generation Legacy
Peter Altabef, ’83, has been the person in charge at some of the world’s biggest and best-known technology companies. Today, in addition to serving as chairman and CEO of one of those companies—Unisys—he is leading a broad and deep national effort to create a safe and secure Internet.
The first person in his family to have gone to college, Altabef came to the Law School with a business orientation inspired in part by his father, a Manhattan garment-industry executive who would discuss his daily business challenges with his family over dinner. “The law and economics orientation drew me to UChicago,” Altabef said, “and the quality of the faculty and students was pretty breathtaking. For most of my first year I wondered when the administration was going to realize the mistake they had made in admitting me. After a while, though, I got the hang of it.”
He clerked for a US federal appeals court judge after graduation and then worked for a year in New York before joining Hughes & Luce in Dallas. There his assignments included working on business and family legal matters of the legendary entrepreneur Ross Perot. He became the general counsel of Perot Systems in 1993 and was named the company’s president and CEO in 2004.
When Perot Systems was acquired by Dell in 2009, Altabef was put at the helm of the resulting business unit, Dell Services, which had nearly 45,000 employees. Charged with putting that division on a stable business footing, he had fulfilled that responsibility in 2011, and he soon moved on to take the top leadership roles at MICROS Systems, where he presided over the 2014 sale of that company to Oracle for more than five billion dollars. He joined Unisys as its CEO the next year and has led a resurgence of profitability at that venerable company.
He said that the Law School imparted a skill that has been fundamental to his accomplishments: “The Law School taught me how to go deep into a complex issue quickly, how to get to the essence of it with just a few questions. The companies I’ve led have been quite complex, providing multiple services and solutions across a very wide range of industries and geographic areas, and getting to the core of things fast has been an invaluable skill.”
He’s been applying that aptitude as cochair of the cybersecurity moonshot committee of the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee. The committee’s report and recommendations for creating a safe and secure Internet within 10 years were delivered to the White House in late 2018, and since then the committee has been convening experts to develop strategies and tactics to implement its recommendations.
“I have been honored to be part of this process because I don’t think that there is much that is more important than cybersecurity for our national security, social welfare, and sustained economic growth,” Altabef said. “We called what we are doing a ‘moonshot’ because, like President Kennedy’s commitment in the 1960s to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely within a decade, it’s going to require will, ingenuity, resources, and great skill to make it happen. Among other things, we have to address not only the threats we know, but ones we can’t even see today but will be coming.”
He is a member of the Law School Advisory Council, which he said has been not just an honor but also a source of great pleasure, since the council’s meetings give him an extra opportunity to visit his two children in Chicago. They both have ties to the Law School: daughter Hayley graduated in 2017 and is an associate at a Chicago firm, and son Will is in the class of 2021.
“To my mind, there isn’t a law school whose graduates are as well prepared and as sharp, and who consistently show the discipline and work ethic of UChicago graduates,” he said. “The Law School helped me enjoy a very fulfilling career, and my wife and I are thrilled that our daughter and son will have that same opportunity.”