ECS Buys i Service Unit from HP-EDS

Published: December 15, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

ECS, one of the oldest computer leasing companies in the biz, gave me an opportunity to test out all of those years of French I took in high school and college when it announced recently that it has acquired the Remote Delivery Center/400 business unit from the formerly independent Electronic Data Systems.

ECS, formerly known as Europe Computer Systemes, has been around for more than 30 years and has over 64,000 servers and over 1 million PCs under lease at some 12,000 clients around Europe. Since 1984, ECS has been a wholly owned subsidiary of French bank, Societe General. EDS, which is only one letter off, is the IT services giant that has just been acquired by Hewlett-Packard. About a fifth of ECS customers, according to my translation of the press release put out by ECS France, which refers to this as the "PME" space (c'est petit, not small), are AS/400, iSeries, and System i shops, and considering how relatively weak the i platform is in France, that shows just how strong ECS must be in other European countries.

What is not entirely clear to me from this announcement is exactly what RDC/400 is. It looks like remote business connectivity and perhaps outsourcing services. You give it a try:

"Ces nouveaux services s'intègrent parfaitement dans l'approche globale d'ECS dans cet environnement en associant la location, la continuité d'exploitation, l'infogérance et l'hébergement: elle a déjà séduit plus de 1 500 clients en Europe," précise Laurent Briziou, directeur général adjoint d'ECS.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but it looks like RDC/400 had 167 customers in 35 countries that had a total of 120,000 users accessing the services.

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