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EDS shake-up continues

Continuing with a company-wide shake-up, the services and consulting giant reorganizes along geographic lines and names top management for a new e-business unit.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
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Continuing with a company-wide shake-up, services and consulting giant Electronic Data Systems is reorganizing along geographic lines and has named top management for a new e-business unit intended to fuel new growth.

EDS, which is struggling to regain momentum, as well as the top spot in the U.S. IT services market which it recently lost to IBM Global Services, said it plans to divide into marketing units covering the geographic areas of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Latin America, Canada, Asia/Pacific and Japan, and the United States. That strategy replaces the company's traditional focus on specific industries.

Leaders of each geographic unit will report to EDS chief operating officer Jeff Heller. The Plano, Texas-based firm has not yet named an executive who will be charged with improving EDS's lagging U.S. sales.

However, the company has added several new areas, including State Business and Energy and Utilities, to its U.S. sales focus, as opportunities in these areas expand. EDS is currently negotiating an outsourcing deal with the State of Connecticut and is competing for another outsourcing contract with San Diego County against IBM and CSC.

In addition, EDS promoted Gary Moore to head the newly-formed e-Business Solutions, from his former position as president of EDS's manufacturing group, the company's largest business unit. Moore, 49, who will report directly to EDS CEO Dick Brown, will be replaced by John Brunet, current president of EDS's Durable Good Industries unit.

E-Business Solutions will have 20,000 employees, is expected to post $2 billion in 1999 revenues, and will combine the high-end management consulting of EDS's A.T. Kearney unit with EDS's overall systems integration and outsourcing services.

The new unit--which will cater partly to the needs of companies building online electronic payment and procurement systems--merges a number of EDS businesses, including Systemhouse, the computer integration and consulting arm of MCI WorldCom that EDS bought in February, along with other EDS units including Centrobe, Electronic Business, CIO Services, Human Performance Services, Enterprise Solutions, Business Intelligence Services.