Some pretty big news in the tech world from last week - HP acquired EDS. I worked at EDS for 3 years, and I still know people who work there, so this acquisition is pretty interesting to me. I actually think that this merger is a great idea (as opposed to the proposed Yahoo!/Microsoft deal). Only handling the outsourcing piece, EDS frequently found itself in a position where it would implement a solution for a customer based on a certain technology, only to see it acquired by a competitor - Tivoli, Opsware, and Micromuse are all examples of this. Being integrated with a technology provider (both of hardware and software) will better insulate EDS from this problem, and stabilize their portfolio offerings.

Furthermore, I think there are some decent possibilities for integrating the services portion and the technology side - especially with software. Companies like Opsware have talked about datacenter automation, and built some software to do that, but as demonstrated by Loudcloud, the whole area of datacenter operation can be taken much further when the software is integrated with service delivery.

Speakng of Loudcloud, HP bought Opsware last year, and back in 2002 EDS purchased the service half of Loudcloud -- so now the two halves are back together, and the HP name.

So, I'll be interested to see how this works out. I think that if HP and EDS are smart about the merging process, that the combined entity can come out on the other side as a real competitor to IBM.

-Andy.