The Blog sphere and the news has plenty of pieces on HP acquiring EDS, with a lot of speculation on what that means. Indeed there are so many pieces on these two topics that I will break with my usual habit of providing a couple of urls so you can see what is being said, and instead I have provided a list of interesting ones below.
What strikes me is that most of the comment is based on examining the impact of these moves in terms of our current technology products or IT services business models, whereas I think we should be thinking about them in terms of moves towards building business models for the next generation. The most common view is that EDS has failed to develop its offerings to compete in the new world with other System Integrators and that their acquired Indian business MemphiS is run as a standalone separate business. But what if it’s not the people and the high end integration that are at the centre of this move?

HP strategy seems to have been to keep out of the other technology vendors Middleware space and instead to complement their solutions with a comprehensive computing layer that they can buy to build on. But this game is changing, as Cloud Computing figures more and more on the agenda and at the same time ‘services’ start to become a reality, as well as Software as a Service. Building and operating a Cloud Computing environment is all about volume, look at Amazon with their Elastic Cloud offering. The negatives that have been expressed about EDS is that it is still a huge Data Centre and desktop operator, and that these Data Centres are all separate and not integrated.
Could this be a huge opportunity for HP to a) get all important volume in place for its transition to selling power and storage through a Cloud model and b) to make those ‘basic’ outsource contracts profitable? In addition would this also be a move to follow the other technology vendors as they change their product sets and require a Cloud Layer with certain integration characteristics? And would the same strategy keep HP Services from competing with those System Integrators who are moving up the stack to increase the business value of their offers?
The puzzling piece is what role MemphasiS could play in all of this, but hey all the above is only speculation, unless someone from HP wants to post any statements! However my key point is that the future for provisioning technology elements does not look like the past, and that the results, one way or another, of the HP acquisition of EDS are more likely to be as a result of the future demands than the past.

• Good structured piece from Business Week
• A wide selection of comments from various sources here
• About HP and cloud computing strategy
• With a comparison with other competitors in this strategy
• IBM joining forces with Google in cloud computing, which force HP to react