If a revamped account structure designed to give customers easier access to the company’s resources and experience isn’t enough to draw them in, EDS will also be dangling the prospect of very aggressive pricing.
Steve Schuckenbrock outlined the company’s strategy last week. Until last Monday, Schuckenbrock was COO of The Feld Group, a consultancy run by former industry CIOs for which EDS last week paid $89m. The buy capped a year of transformation as EDS sought to recover from a series of financial missteps in the second half of 2002.
Now Schuckenbrock is EDS’s executive vice president, global sales and client solutions, and the man responsible for selling the revamped EDS to customers. Last Thursday, he unveiled the shape of the new sales organization to EDS employees.
Central to the revamped Sales and Client Solutions organization is a new account team structure. Account teams will consist of a client executive who has ultimate responsibility for the relationship, along with a client sales executive, a client delivery executive, and a client industry executive.
Schuckenbrock said the new structure addresses a key fault of the pre-transformation EDS. This fault was best summed up in last week’s video presentation by Charlie Feld, founder of the Feld Group, and now EDS’s executive vice president, portfolio management, who said EDS had to be able to act like a $21bn company, not like 40,000 developers in 3,000 tribes.
Mr. Schuckenbrock told ComputerWire that as well as growing its existing base, EDS is chasing a full range of prospects, which included the kind of mega deals that tantalized the services sector for much of last year. He said there is a significant pipeline in the consumer goods and retail market.
And if a revamped account structure isn’t enough to tempt customers, Schuckenbrock said he is also ready to get very aggressive on price. The company is able to compete hard on price, he said, because of the cost cutting it has undertaken since 2002.
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This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
