Stan Gibson

EDS has taken many of the tough steps necessary to execute a corporate turnaround. The company has shed incompatible units, eschewed risky deals and cut costs. CEO Michael Jordan said in eWEEKs recent cover story that these steps have taken hold and are starting to pay off. There are signs that he is right. But, […]

General Motors CIO Ralph Szygenda last week rolled out what he has called the third wave of outsourcing—$7.5 billion of IT work over the next five years—but few big changes were apparent, raising questions about how the beleaguered company will benefit from its technology model, which Szygenda has spent years painstakingly constructing. Indeed, once the […]

EDS, Hewlett-Packard and Capgemini emerged as the biggest winners as General Motors handed out some 7.5 billion dollars worth of IT contracts for the next five years. Also getting significant pieces of the pie were IBM, Compuware Covisint and Wipro. The announcement was the culmination of a 10-year process of disengagement from EDS as GMs […]

NEW YORK—IBM is seeking to capitalize on its considerable research efforts by disseminating its speech recognition, language translation and speech synthesis software to users and software makers in a variety of industries. Although the company has many research irons in the fire at its Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and at other facilities, […]

While there is much talk about outsourcing and services being the future of IT—and IT becoming, in effect, a service—it seems that IT outsourcing is actually not growing—depending on what statistics you look at and which you believe. TPI, a sourcing advisory company, reported that in 2005, the total value of global commercial outsourcing contracts […]

The oil portrait of a young Ross Perot is back on the wall. Buried in storage during the Dick Brown era, the picture has been dusted off and rehung outside the top executives offices at Electronic Data Systems Corp.s headquarters. The symbolism: For CEO Michael Jordan, the turnaround of his company wont be complete until […]

No turnaround at Electronic Data Systems Corp. would be possible without first clearing away the wreckage of by far the worst deal in the companys history: the Navy Marine Corps Intranet contract. Signed in 2000, the $7 billion contract for the worlds largest intranet was costing EDS $800 million annually at its low point. It […]

To listen to some people, youd think the race for technology leadership in the 21st century has already been decided. China and India have won; the United States has lost. Widely quoted numbers of annual engineering graduates support the bleak forecast. Hungry for economic development and rising personal income, India and China, we are told, […]

General Motors Corp. blessed two vendors, the Reynolds and Reynolds Company and Quorum Information Technologies Inc., as providers of management systems for its vehicle retailers. The selection of providers of its IDMS (Integrated Dealer Management System) is separate from the 40-odd deals that GM plans to announce later this month—divvying up the huge amount of […]

With a fully outsourced IT strategy, can a company gain a technological edge? Fred Killeen, acting chief technology officer of General Motors Corp., is trying to find a way. General Motors has had an outsourced IT model for twenty-one years, ever since the automotive giant acquired Electronic Data Systems Corp. to take over its IT […]