Let's replace all EDS's infrastructure with HP Kit, and the customers can pay.
I've seen these ideas before, a CEO, who has bog all idea of what their end customers do, or want, decides that changing their kit, applications, telecoms providers to their choice means that the company will make bigger margins and reduce costs, and the clients will like it because they get charged less, sometimes.
Except that:
A) If the customers had wanted HP's choice of kit they would have bought it from HP in the first place. Even IBM Global services aren't that daft, still Sun's biggest customer I think.
B) Some clients like the DoD, MoD, etc. etc. might have a lot to say about how and where HP might want to manage their kit.
I can think of several examples where companies have done stuff like this and they have lost clients or incurred extra costs, rather than saved them because they couldn't shut a data centre and transfer it offshore, nor manage it from offshore as the data centre contained systems the clients had specifically told their supplier they had to be sited and managed in country for security reasons. The supplier that switched all their network kit to a new cheap supplier, only to find that several NATO governments didn't like their choice of Chinese kit.
Still it could be worse, it could have been Microsoft doing the buying, can we look forward to some further consolidation.
Cisco buys CAP, Sun buys Accenture....
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