Did someone at EDS miss the memo?
by William VambenepeTwo months ago, HP announced the acquisition of EDS.
One month later, HP Software announced a slew of new service management products, including an updated version (7.5) of Universal CMDB (from the Mercury acquisition).
One month later (today), according to BMC (with supporting quote from an EDS exec), “EDS Asia Pacific Standardises on BMC Software Atrium CMDB to Improve Service Delivery”.
As an ex-colleague pointed out to me, the acquisition isn’t closed yet. Still.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:31 am
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July 16th, 2008 at 11:32 am
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July 17th, 2008 at 10:46 am
HP is famous for this kind of stuff. About 10 years ago there was a famous incident where a VP of hardware at HP announced at a CA conference that CA was HP’s strategic ESM provider. That same week there was an HP/Openview conference where the head of OV product development had to respond to the CEO’s comments.
HP, IMHO, has always had a hard time playing the “we are a hardware/software compnay card” as well as IBM does.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
It depends on how they want to run the organization. If it is a true services company then the services company should be able to choose the products they feel best meets the demands to support the customer. IBM GS does this and is not required to use IBM products. Service reveneue will probably be more than the software anyway.
July 18th, 2008 at 12:40 am
To Anonymous: You’re right that they’ll use whatever they need for the job. I have no doubt that they’ll use BMC products at least from time to time long after the acquisition is consumed. But there is a difference between using it as needed and standardizing their practice on it.
And even if they standardize on it, that doesn’t mean that they have to agree to support a BMC press release to trumpet it…
I have no idea what happened here. Many people still don’t know that HP has a large software organization, but it’s hard to imagine that the “executive director of EDS Asia Pacific’s service management capability program” would be one of them. Maybe this announcement had been in the works for a long time, starting before the HP/EDS announcement and the process was on auto-pilot. Maybe EDS AsiaPac truly believes that BMC is so superior that it will remain their standard after the acquisition (in which case I predict a few entertaining conf calls with California). Or maybe someone wanted to get in the front of the line for the upcoming distribution of severance packages…
July 18th, 2008 at 4:11 am
hahahaha. that is priceless - thanks for reminding me about the CA HP deal botchagalupe-that was one of the funniest partnership announcements ever. i was at CA World for that one. To William’s point there is literally NO WAY HP could just rip out the BMC installs at EDS outsourcing clients. it doesn’t work like that, and never will.