The Services market get more competitive

Today is write-up day for the subscriber magazine, the out-line was approved with no changes. The problem with today is I have a vendor briefing with Fujitsu-Siemens that is scheduled for an hour, a telephone call with an organisation to discuss IT strategy formation (research for the report I am working on, but not due to start for two weeks), and a telephone call with another IT director on the same subject. This all means that my writing day will be disjointed. To make things worse, I have also to write a look-ahead, a short article on a topic that coincides with the magazine publication, July, so the challenge is to find out something IT relevant that is going to happen and write an analysis of it before it has happened. This is not too bad when there are plenty of events, but July is a quiet month so the linkage may be tenuous.

HP and EDS a good marriage?

The purchase of EDS by HP has not been widely received as positive, which is due to the fact that HP has a reputation for taking a long time to integrate its mergers and acquisitions before they demonstrate stakeholder value. However, I believe in this case HP should be able to re-brand EDS and merge its own services function in to it, which will be a quicker approach and faster to return value.The key to why HP has taken this step can be seen in its solutions to data centre automation, these technologies when applied in services contracts will allow the services company to increase margin, by significantly reducing cost. It also provides HP with the ability to add the EDS data centres to its own very aggressive plans (currently well under way) to restructure the network and data centre configuration, which is yielding significant savings and providing HP with some more green credentials