EDS put a big stake in the ground by declaring friends and foes yesterday when they created the EDS Agilty Alliance.
- Foes: IBM and HP.
- Friends: Cisco, Dell, EMC, Microsoft, Sun, Xerox (listed in alphabetical order presumably not to indicate any preference.)
When EDS acquired The Feld Group at the beginning of the year, Charlie Feld became EVP Portfolio Management – think of it as a role where the CTO and CIO report to him and he defines and builds both the product / service strategy and the internal systems to support the strategy (massive in EDS’s case.) One of Charlie’s classic moves whenever he becomes CIO somewhere is to lock down a finite set of well defined technology relationships to act as the backbone for all future buildout of technology. I remember a few examples of the top of my head – he did this at Frito-Lay with IBM (I think at one point, Frito-Lay was one of the largest users of OS/2 in the world) and Delta with Tibco.
Reading between the lines, EDS has decided enemy #1 and enemy #2 are IBM and HP respectively. The EDS Agility Alliance draws a line in the sand. If you add it up, you’ve got a “virtual company” that has $150 billion of combined annual revenue and $13.6 billion of annual R&D spending.
There are lots of good nuggets in the press release, including the signalling that “EDS will announce its application, business process and industry alliance members in the coming months.” (e.g. expect more to come.) If you are interested in the evolution of the high end of the IT services world, it’s worth a look.