EDS

A recent U.K. court finding against HP's EDS for failing to deliver on its sales pitch could radically change the dynamics of outsourcing everywhere.

HP Wednesday announced it would leave the EDS brand behind and rename its IT services provider business HP Enterprise Services.

Microsoft began offering customers in 18 countries its hosted services and signed up EDS to resell the offerings.

Acquired last year by HP, EDS now provides customers with a choice of service tiers at different pricing levels, company officials say, which allows customers to better contract services based on business needs.

IT outsourcing providers were largely unscathed by the economic downturn throughout much of 2008. But by the end of the year CIOs were too distracted by the economic destruction surround them to do any outsourcing deals. That's all poised to change in 2009. The only problem is, that may be bad news for both IT services providers and their IT leader customers.

HP reported a 19 percent jump in revenue for the October quarter, lifted by its EDS acquisition and strong sales of laptop computers and blade servers.

HP said Tuesday that it has completed its $13.9 billion purchase of massive systems integrator EDS, and it also revealed that EDS' top-level management structure would remain largely unchanged.