it was making 14,500 job cuts = provided Mott with a $15.3m compensation package

It's ALWAYS on the backs of the workers....many of whom could have done the same damn job at way less money without screwing the worker-bees. money-grubbing bastards.

"Now that I think about it, it might have made more sense back in July 2005 to have outsourced the whole HP IT transformation project to EDS and then bought the company when the project was done"

Are you having a laugh? EDS couldn't arrange a piss-up in a brewery.

The quality of service received from HP from my company, who have a pretty huge MgdSer/hosting contract with them, has been utterly abysmal over the last 9 months or so.. Really really really really bad. The first 2 support tiers they provide seem to be staffed by people who have *heard* about computers, but only once, in passing, when they were drunk, and right before they suffered a massive concussion. The 3rd level are only marginally less feckless, and seem totally bewildered when one suggests, for example, maybe checking server logs to ascertain when faults started occurring, or when a service failed.. Feckless bastards.

Pirate, because there isn't a cowboy.

Apparently most of them are humming along full of servers still, but they're no longer classified as "data centres" so they don't count. How many of those sites have actually been decommissioned - did HP mention?

the goal when Mott started was to move from 25,000 servers sprawled across those 85 data centers to around 14,000 machines

Which could have all been running on a single mainframe...D'OH