HP Acquires EDS
This could be big news in Unified Communications: HP is acquiring EDS at a cost of almost $14 billion.
HP has been moving toward the services model that IBM perfected several years ago, and they clearly positioned the EDS acquisition as the key move in that effort:
Acquiring EDS advances HP's stated objective of strengthening its services business. The specific service offerings delivered by the combined companies are: IT outsourcing, including data center services, workplace services, networking services and managed security; business process outsourcing, including health claims, financial processing, CRM and HR outsourcing; applications, including development, modernization and management; consulting and integration; and technology services. The combination will provide extensive experience in offering solutions to customers in the areas of government, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, energy, transportation, communications, and consumer industries and retail.
EDS has been involved in some major enterprise VOIP projects, including the Bank of America rollout. Furthermore, it's been widely predicted that systems integrators will play a significant role in enterprise UC deployments, because of the transition to software architectures in UC and the potential complexity of the interworking among the various communications and other systems.
Update: Given the trend toward managed services that Robin Gareiss pointed out in last week's VoiceCon webinar, this would definitely be a deal worth watching by enterprise IT decision-makers. However, Om Malik notes in his post about the deal that both HP and EDS have been more focused on infrastructure outsourcing than applications. The UC play is definitely more about systems integration services than simply outsourcing your infrastructure, so we'll have to see whether HP becomes a major SI in UC.
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