By CHRIS BARTON
EDS has changed its logo. The blue square with the letters EDS centred, right justified and reversed out in white has given way to a blue-black circle. Only the slightly larger letter E, now off-centre in the lower right quadrant, is inside the circle.
In the staid IT corporate world EDS inhabits, the logo change is radical - symbolising not just a new-found focus on matters "e" but also some dramatic restructuring within.
But it is odd to find that the man who has driven the makeover - CEO and board chairman Richard (Dick) H. Brown - still has the old blue square on his business card. So has the Texas-based computer services giant really changed its squares to spots or is the new look just skin deep?
"We changed the logo to align with the new economy our legacy of leadership in IT and to show we're deeply immersed in e-business and e-commerce," said Mr Brown, here for the launch of Esolutions - a menage a trois of EDS, Telecom and Microsoft.
Mr Brown acknowledged that, unlike IBM, not a lot of people know EDS. But that is changing too. The largely invisible Electronic Data Services - founded by billionaire Ross Perot, who sold it in 1984 - is lifting its profile.
It began with a $US4 million, 60-second TV commercial played during the Superbowl football game to an estimated 140 million viewers. The ad used the apparently common IT saying, "It's so difficult it's like herding cats," and showed that when it comes to "making complexity simple" the EDS cowboys can in fact round up domesticated felines.
It is the sort of theme Mr Brown uses when lay people ask just "who is" EDS - downplaying the company's association with running the huge data centres crammed full of mainframe and other computers that keep the fabric of society intact.
"We harness technology to solve business problems. We're about the value proposition to make businesses and Governments better."
But he does admit that running the computer systems of so many large corporate companies and Government organisations around the world - such as the eftpos network, the police database and the Winz systems in New Zealand - does carry an enormous responsibility.
Which is where size does count. A string of big numbers can be reeled off to attest to the company's bulk - such as 1999 revenues of $US18.5 billion, compared with $US16.9 billion in 1998; or that EDS also managed 2.2 million desktops worldwide and "touched over a billion customers of our customers" last year.
"That's comforting to a client that puts their nerve centre in our hands."
The former head of Cable & Wireless says he accepted the EDS job a year ago because it was simply an opportunity he couldn't resist. But when he took over in January 1999 he found a company bound up in bureaucracy which made it difficult to deal with.
It had also taken "its eye off the marketplace," causing it "to store calories."
Mr Brown trimmed the fat by axing 8400 jobs from 120,000 worldwide and by slimming down 48 strategic business units to four to include AT Kearny, EDS's consulting subsidiary; E.solutions, its e-business unit; Business Process Management, the company's focus on customer management, claims processing, and settlement processing; and Information Solutions, its IT development unit.
So far the changes seem to be working - bringing about cost savings of $US1 billion and in the latest quarter a profit rise of 12 per cent to $US295 million. EDS signed $US11.2 billion of new contracts during the quarter, including its largest deal ever - a $6.4 billion agreement with MCI WorldCom. The stock - currently at about $US69 a share - has gained 75 per cent since Mr Brown was named chief executive.
While traditional outsourcing, in which EDS runs computer systems for other companies and Government organisations, still accounts for most of its sales, new e-commerce contracts have more than doubled this year.
"Our pipeline on e-work increased 64 per cent last year," he said.
The launch of Esolutions in New Zealand reflects the move to helping companies buy and sell over the internet.
Mr Brown regards the alliance as a first especially because there is "skin in the game." In July, Telecom signed a 10-year, $1.5 billion contract for EDS to supply all its information systems services and cemented in the long-term nature of the relationship by taking a 10 per cent equity in EDS New Zealand, with an option to increase its shareholding to 49 per cent over four years.
"We're joined at the hip and focused in a virtual way to bring B2B [business to business] e-commerce to the New Zealand market."
The New Zealand announcement focusing initially on renting Microsoft Office applications over the net follows other global alliances, including subsidiary EDS CoNext, which will use Ariba's B2B e-commerce software to link groups of partners and suppliers that want to purchase goods and services over the internet.
Huge EDS putting weight behind 'E'
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