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Dell acquires services firm Perot Systems

By admin, September 21, 2009 8:53 am

In the latest bid by a major hardware manufacturer to buy its way into the services market, Dell has announced the acquisition of Perot Systems for $3.9 billion. This comes on the heels of numerous smaller services-related acquisitions by Dell as it has watched its core hardware business plummet over the past year, and after competitor Hewlett-Packard picked up Perot precursor EDS last year for $13.9 billion with a similar view.

Dell and Perot previously cooperated in efforts to get in early on the expanding electronic health records market and perhaps found some common ground to lay the foundation for this merger. Certainly, the fact that EDS has become the most profitable division of HP in the past year could not have hurt Dell's appreciation of Perot Systems as a possible acquisition. Perot is a smaller company than EDS but has a similarly broad scope of services, and Dell no doubt hopes to extend those offerings to its many hardware customers to make up the gap.

Dell's current service offerings seem to have found more traction in the SME market than with the enterprise but if they can manage a successful integration effort with Perot Systems they may be well-poised to pick up on some of the larger businesses which have been leaning toward the HP/EDS side of the table.


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