Sceptics of IBM Corp’s plans to build facilities management into a big business contend that companies with long experience of the work, most notably Electronic Data Systems Corp, but also Computer Sciences Corp, and Hoskyns Group Plc in the UK, will always be able to undercut IBM and run a project more efficiently, and that where IBM does win, the work will not prove profitable. Their case was strengthened yesterday when Xerox Corp announced that it had chosen the General Motors Corp subsidiary over IBM for its vast multi-year facilities management contract, estimated to be worth as much as $4,000m; Computer Sciences Corp was eliminated from the contest last week. The agreement is expected to cover data centre operations, worldwide speech and data telecommunications, desktop systems support and business-support applications, and an army of Xerox data processing employees is expected to move across.
