Jack -
You are making a fundamental error in looking at services. The CPQ services business has almost nothing to do with "break-fix". That is handled primarily by the channel partners, and the back end support for "break-fix" is done by the product groups or geo organizations.
CPQ services is an organization which does design, custom development, systems analysis, business process re-engineering and other such work. It is comparable and directly competitive with outfits like EDS.
At the time of the acquisition, many in the industry noted that this would push EDS and Anderson consulting away from CPQ and over to DELL. Now that CPQ has joined IBM and HP in providing this capability in-house, DELL is the last choice of the "big 4" for a hardware partner who has no high end consulting capability.
The recent posts about how CPQ "lost the EDS account" through arrogance and poor execution is just nonsense. They lost that account when they bought DEC. It just took this long for normal purchasing cycles to make that shift obvious. EDS uses their purchasing power and reference selling to advance their consulting business, and it was obvious more than a year ago that this would give DELL a big advantage.
CPQ has actually done remarkably well to keep mindshare with EDS as well as they have. EDS still recommends CPQ servers over any other partner, and buys their own servers from CPQ rather than DELL. DELL just got the desktop business, both internally and reference.
EDS has made pointed comments about the fact that customers seem to accept the direct model for desktop purchases - the benefit of superior configuration capability and lower cost is really all that matters in what is seen as essentially a commodity item. CPQ clearly has some work to do if they are to maintain their current lead in corporate desktop sales.
But likewise, the fact that EDS still specifies and recommends CPQ servers over any other brand despite the competitive issues speaks to how strongly the base server technology, which CPQ invented, and the combined infrastructure and services play, especially the storage pieces, works for CPQ. DELL can not offer anything like the same product - they can only provide the hardware, and even that is a couple of steps behind CPQ.
So don't try and evaluate CPQ services based on break-fix - that isn't what they do. |
