EDS officially a part of HP

As part of its parent company's new fold, EDS trotted out a new tiered-pricing model for Application Management Services and new EDS-branded Managed Services.

Ian Brown, senior analyst at advisory and consulting firm Ovum said it's not exactly new services, but what is new is the way EDS has productised its services à la HP for global delivery and consumption.

So what's on offer? With the Application Management Services, EDS is targeting customers that don't want to fully outsource their applications development and maintenance, but want a short-term tactical solution to running their existing applications efficiently and cost-effectively.

"EDS comes in, conducts an application profiling exercise and on the basis of that enables the customer to select the level of support (and price) appropriate to the criticality of the application(s)," said Brown.

"Not all applications need the highest levels of support, so the new tiered-pricing levels allow customers to lower the cost of running less-critical applications, while maintaining the highest levels of support for their critical applications."

He said, the new EDS-branded Managed Services portfolio initially covers server and storage operations, service desk, 'flexible computing' and managed messaging. Additional services will follow later in the year.

"If server and storage operations sound like something HP Technology Services might have already been doing, the difference with the EDS version is that it's 'truly' multi-vendor and includes proactive remote management - services that EDS already provides for all of its outsourcing clients," said Brown.

"Service desk is also a core EDS' competence, but in addition to its expertise, it brings global scale and delivery capabilities.

"'Flexible computing' again sounds like something more akin to HP's portfolio."

Essentially infrastructure as a service, this is like HP's utility computing of old - the ability to buy chunks of dedicated, hosted computing capacity from HP for short periods of two months or more, he said.

Managed Messaging is a hosted Exchange messaging service targeted at midrange clients up to the lower foothills of the Global 2000.