THE MAKER OF jolly expensive printer ink, HP is close to signing on the bottom line in a deal to buy outsourcing outfit EDS.

The deal will cost HP more than $13 billion but will give the outfit some fairly lucrative government outsourcing deals.

According to the Wall Street Journal the deal could be announced as early as later today, but neither HP nor EDS are saying anything.

The strokers of beards and pontificators on matters IT, claim that EDS will give HP a good weapon to compete with IBM in the lucrative field of technology consulting and customer support. EDS's clients include General Motors, Bank Of America, KarstadtQuelle, Kraft, the United States Navy, and the UK Ministry of Defence.

In Blighty it has not had a good record. In November 2001, it was unable to finish a £300 million project to supply the UK's Ministry of Defence with a payroll system.

In December 2003, it lost a 10-year £3 billion contract to run the UK Inland Revenue IT services after a series of bungles in the payment of tax credits. It ran over-budget on a project for the UK’s Child Support Agency and admitted that the whole thing was "badly designed, badly tested and badly implemented".

Last year BSkyB won £709m compensation from EDS, claiming that the company's failure to meet its agreed service standards resulted not just from incompetence, but from fraud and deceit in the way it pitched for the contract. µ

L'Inq
AP