We have very specific plans for deliverables we’ve committed to for ’05, said Charlie Feld, EDS’s executive vice president of portfolio management, in a webcast. The seven-vendor EDS-led alliance was announced with hype, but little substance, last October.
Under the banner of Modernization, EDS said it will offer an Applications Rationalization Service that the firm claims will address proliferation, duplication of functionality, excessive interfacing and high maintenance costs.
A new Applications Modernization Service, offered with Agility Alliance partners Microsoft and Oracle, is aimed squarely at IBM’s user base.
[We’re going to] create re-platforming tools against the major platforms, Feld said. There are some 30,000 mainframes in the world, and we intend to have products to allow us to go from OS/390 to .Net, from AS/400 to .Net, from AS/400 to J2EE, from OS/390 to Linux.The company is also talking the language of utility computing and virtualization, with the announcement of the Agile Enterprise Platform, a network-based utility architecture designed, the company claims, to help its clients react more quickly to change and save money.
Feld talked of simplification, process reengineering, reducing variations so we have consistency at the company’s data centers. Here, EDS says it is being helped by Cisco Systems, another of its alliance partners.
We’re making significant investments in automation, so we can reduce the number of people in our data centers, Feld said. Then we’re going through a consolidation effort to get asset utilization up to get our costs more in line and more competitive.
With Sun Microsystems Inc, EDS says it will deliver Virtual Services Suite, to meet client demans for processing surge capacity, running Sun Fire AMD Opteron servers.
On the compliance side, EDS also talked up a new email archiving service, built with EMC’s Centera storage systems and Exchange and Lotus Notes messaging software.
