Hewlett-Packard's bid to purchase it services company EDS, initiated in May, has finally born fruit after clearing regulatory hurdles in both the US and EU.

One of the largest mergers in the industry, and a close second for HP behind it's purchase of competitor Compaq, the EDS deal positions the company as a significant threat to more traditionally focused hardware and services firms, IBM being the most notable. HPs gamble is that it can sufficiently integrate the businesses and cultures to match Big Blue's long-practiced services in this realm. It's a bold move but quite possibly a winning one as the enterprise hardware market faces the dual threats of SaaS and cloud based fulfillment (rendering the utilization of server hardware over the breadth of the industry far more efficient than it has been, and therefore requiring in the long term fewer machines to the task) and virtualization on the horizon.