HP gobbles up EDS

Looks like the rumored deal closed. HP now has a generally well regarded services team, with deep US government connections. Going to give IBM a run for its money. The question is whom else will tie up? And how? EDS isn’t an HPC vendor/provider, but HP is. Which suggests that if there is money to be made in “them thar hills” of HPC (and there is), that EDS may be retooling for this. Which also suggests some of the smaller players with tools and expertise may be next (ulp!).

Google bought Peakstream to get access to talent. Cilk, Rapidmind and a few others have neat multicore tools, and I expect one or more of them to be snapped up soon. Simtone snapped up ASPEED. Smaller service providers and vendors with expertise are busier than ever, with partnerships with large organization, and others. And may not be long for this world as independent entities, but as parts of larger organizations. The issue is making sure you tie up with a good organization going forward. This is hard. There are lots of shops that ship gear, and don’t really add value. Then there are the value folks who partner to ship gear, and deliver services and support. HPC is not something you can learn well in a day, a week, a year. There are many (very subtle) aspects to it, and your run-of-the-mill MCSE with a certificate in HPC won’t quite make the grade at solving transient and fine grain contention issues. HPC as a market is driving other markets profitability. HPC is an enabling technology, and is pushing out to the masses with multi-core and GPU systems. We are seeing far more demand for desktop Linux systems than ever before, coming from this community. They want to run the same OS as on the cluster. They don’t mind it saving them money as well. This acquisition increases HP’s abilities to deliver value added services. Not sure about the HPC value added services, but I suspect they will be coming from EDS. And I do expect the value providers in this market to continue getting snapped up. Nothing wrong with this as an exit strategy for a small provider, and it immediately infuses a larger organization with badly needed talent. Also keeps them away from the competitors. Who may buy them. I had heard Dell and others had been thinking about serious offers for EDS in the past. Dell would have been interesting, but this opportunity is now history. There will be others for Dell though.