Although it’s not exactly consumer news, Hewlett-Packard recently completed its acquisition of IT solutions company EDS for almost $14 billion dollars. The acquisition was intended to boost revenue HP receives from services to its large enterprise, organizational, and government customers. The move puts HP solidly into the consulting business (in fact, making it the largest IT solutions provider on the planet), should roughly double the annual revenue HP sees from services, and could enable HP to reach out to small and medium sized business with consulting services.
EDS also runs a large number of data centers around the world; the EDS acquisition may also help position HP to develop and/or support cloud-based computing services, which are starting to seriously move into the consumer space with things like Amazon S3, Apple’s MobileMe, Google Apps, and (of course) WIndows Live services.
Now that the EDS deal is done, though, HP has let the other shoe drop: over the next three years, HP expects to cut about 24,600 positions from the combined HP and EDS workforces. The cuts will come over the next three years, with about half of them coming from positions within the United States. HP figures the move will save it about $1.8 billion per year.
HP said the cuts would focus on eliminating overlapping positions in areas such as human resources, information technology, legal, and accounting, and enable the company to shed excess office space and facilities. HP will take a $1.7 billion charge in its fourth quarter ending in October to finance the cuts—and almost 25,000 pairs of feet will start hitting the pavement.
