HP Building a One-Stop Data Center Shop

EYP has 350 staff members and 13 offices in the United States and the United Kingdom. It plans, designs, builds and supports large-scale data centers. At the time of the transaction, HP executives said EYP's emphasis on designing energy-efficient facilities would complement its own data center technology, such as HP Dynamic Smart Cooling.

With both EYP and EDS under its roof, HP now can claim to be a one-stop data center-making center. EYP can design and build a data center, and EDS can stock, provision and deploy everything inside it. Both new HP divisions offer ongoing maintenance services.

And, by the way, mother ship HP has all those next-generation C-class blade servers and ancillary services ready and waiting if needed. Of course, with profit margins on services averaging about 40 percent per deal and hardware margins about half that, HP can afford to be quite magnanimous and let another company's servers fill those racks—if so decided by the customer.

Can HP's EDS remain vendor-neutral?

Customers certainly will like the options.

"Look at what IBM has already done: They manage products from a whole range of technology providers. And, to be honest with you, HP will have to play the game in that way. If they overemphasize their own products, they could shoot themselves in the foot," Ben Pring, a Gartner analyst in the IT services group, told eWEEK.

The reality is, Pring said, is that "banks, the airlines and telecommunication companies have very complex heterogeneous environments and you simply cannot play a single technology card."

So this is what CEO Mark Hurd, CIO Randy Mott and all their lieutenants have had up their sleeves? The EDS deal reportedly was in the works for about a year.

"Of course, that's been their strategy all along," David Hill, senior analyst with the Mesabi Group, told eWEEK, referring to HP. "They and IBM are very big on building the next-generation data center. These acquisitions make a lot of sense that way."

So IBM, which owns the world's largest IT services business, may soon be feeling the heat. IBM doesn't own an EDS—not even a high-end data center design firm. Everything is handled in Global Services, which certainly is nothing to be sneezed at.

Don't forget, there's a lot to be done before all this begins swinging into action in the marketplace. But it will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

So many data centers to build—so little time.