What is EDS's own Next Big Thing?

I enjoy perusing the EDS Next Big Thing Blog. It is written by the brains at EDS who are paid to look in to the future. Two recent posts - one on trends in storage and compute capacity  and their rapidly declining cost and another operational automation - caught my attention.

And raised the logical question: What is the company which just about invented outsourcing (at least infrastructure outsourcing) doing about both trends?

I would love to hear, on the first, what EDS is doing, for example, to get to price points amazon's elastic cloud can deliver - 15c a gigabyte  a month on its S3 service. If any one can  deliver utility  computing pricing EDS can. It has the scale which puts it on top of most of the stats (petabytes supported, help desk calls handled etc) I quoted in this note.

Second, what is it doing about operational automation? If anything, it seems to be investing more in offshore labor. Last year, EDS invested in the Indian services firm MphasiS.

In November 2005, I wrote a blog hoping EDS would share more about how it is transforming itself. I keep waiting for it. EDS's own next big thing.

 

Comments

[matt]

"Second, what is it doing about operational automation? If anything, it seems to be investing more in offshore labor. Last year, EDS invested in the Indian services firm MphasiS."

Last I knew they were Opsware's (being acquired by HP) biggest customer.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Matt, not surprising - they are also one of Sun, IBM's, EMC's largest customers because of their sheer size. But where is the operational automation showing up in pricing efficiencies? The EDS blog compared such automation to cost savings from offshore labor...would like to see more evidence of that in their execution and pricing...

[Charlie Bess]

Glad to see your still reading the blog. I don't get to put in nearly as many posts as I used to.
Storage is much closer to a commodity than other aspects of computing. Everyone has a clear understanding of what they mean by storing data and what availability and business continuity of that data is. EDS has been working with storage in this manner almost since our inception. Computing is quite a bit different than that though, since one persons market service is not quite the same as another's -- unless you're willing to put up with a generic service. I've seen few enterprise organizations who've been willing to do that though.

On the second note about automation, it is not just about cutting costs. Taking people out of "standard" processes improves quality significantly. I've blogged about that numerous times. As organizations move to an ITIL based delivery approach, they're going to do a great deal of operational automation. There are some startup costs to quality, but it should be cheaper in the long run. I know you've already read that entry though.
There are some white papers and other announcements on the EDS site about the details of those activities. I'll have to dig around an put an entry out with those references, so it will be easier to find.

[vinnie mirchandani]

Charlie, that would be great...thanks

On your second point, I reacted to your comparing automation to offshoring...I think that is an economic perspective, though some of the Indian firms would argue with all their CMM/Six Sigma investments it is also a quality issue

The tech world is full of examples of labor saving and automation activities to improve productivity...so ideally we need both...

[Ken O]

What I see as the "next big thing" for any type of hosting provider, co-location provider, or EDS is indeed a style of "Utility Computing" infrastructure. In essence, it makes a "cloud" (like EC2) out of *existing* assets. That's essentially the ONLY way to get to the $0.10/instance-hour that Amazon charges. And, there are companies/technologies out there that can do this transformation today :)

[vinnie mirchandani]

Ken, with the awesome scale they have, far far greater than what amazon has today, it's theirs for their taking...