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In mid-May of 2008, just a few weeks back, HP’s CEO Mark Hurd announced an agreement to buy EDS for $13,9 billion and stated that it fulfills their strategic objective of expanding in the services area.

This is major news because this agreement means that HP’s and EDS’ combined revenues reaches a whopping $38 billion a year, a bit behind IBM at $54 billion but clearly ahead of Accenture at $21 billion.

According to the merger plan that’s been released, EDS CEO Ron Rittenmeyer will lead a new organization called “EDS — an HP company” and report directly to HP’s Mark Hurd. EDS will still employ 210,000 people but Wall Street is abuzz with rumors of downsizing.

While HP’s IT services unit was already managing P&G’s global consumer products’ tech operations (a 10 year, $3 billion contract, started in 2003), EDS brings blue-chip customers to the table, such as American Airlines, Bank of America and Royal Dutch Shell.

So EDS’ vast vertical and operational expertise which is especially strong in the financial services, health care and government sectors could finally help HP break into the IT services major leagues. The biggest threat to the success of this deal might come from HP’s somewhat “computer and printer” culture that’s still (proverbially speaking) lightyears away from SaaS, cloud computing and other new-wave IT trends for which EDS has proved to be more comfortable with.

HP hopes that with EDS now on its team, big multinationals will look to outsourcers more often to collect, secure, integrate and deliver software and other IT resources over the web.

Of course, the future will tell if giant system integrators, like HP’s newly acquired EDS, will still be required at a time when the SaaS and cloud computing super-efficient duo are removing complexity from many IT activities, across the board.

Tags: hp, eds, operations, merger plan, it, it services, saas, cloud computing, outsourcing, it resources

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It seems new rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will require large publicly held companies to adopt the Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) by December 15th, 2008, for all the financial documents they file with the agency.

Being the financial reporting version of XML, XBRL allows for standardized accounting data to be tagged and retrieved more easily as documents can be mined for data without calling up entirely.

So the SEC is basically requiring big changes from large publicly held companies because their PCs aren’t fast enough to process large documents, errr… while that may hold true, the main reason has to do with the structured way in which the XBRL data is stored.

SEC 10-K annual reports and other documents that use XBRL can be read by software, screened for specific data and then, reorganized into new reports. For investigators and investors looking to quickly search for less common financial data such as “assets held for sale”, the XBRL tagging does wonders.

The new SEC requirement affects “large accelerated filers” which likely includes the majority of the Fortune 500 — 75 companies, including Ford, GE, IBM, Pepsi, United Technologies and Xerox already use XBRL.

Once XBRL has become a standard way of making SEC reports, the mandate is expected to be phased in for smaller publicly held companies. Furthermore, the FDIC and the central banks of the European Union have already adopted XBRL in their reporting.

While the XBRL requirement might seem somewhat steep for large companies, it’s probably a good thing since it’ll be easier for investors, including large retirement fund analysts, to finally be able to quickly compare several companies using very specific variables.

For the financial publications’ readers, this means that the financial reports, in the years to come, might yield significantly more comprehensible information that’ll likely be useful when trying to understand what’s happening in a company where an investment is being considered.

Tags: xbrl, xml, sec, fdic, european banks, financial reports, reporting, standards, compliance, mandate

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