Posted on 09/21/2009 7:16:46 AM PDT by deport
NEW YORK — Dell Inc. plans to buy the technology services company Perot Systems Corp. for about $3.9 billion as it tries to expand beyond the PC business and compete more aggressively with Hewlett-Packard Co. — which also recently bought a tech-services company founded by H. Ross Perot.
Dell said it will offer $30 per share in cash for Perot Systems_ a 68 percent premium over its closing price Friday. Perot Systems' shares rose $11.73, or 65 percent, to $29.64 in morning trading.
Dell shares fell 80 cents, or 4.8 percent, to $15.89.
Former presidential candidate H. Ross Perot Sr., now 79, serves as chairman emeritus of Perot Systems, which he founded in 1988. He earlier had made a fortune from founding Electronic Data Systems Corp. in 1962 and selling the company to General Motors Corp. in a 1984 deal worth $2.5 billion. Hewlett-Packard bought EDS last year for $13.9 billion.
........Plano, Texas-based Perot Systems would bring Dell more than 1,000 customers in a wide range of sectors, from government to manufacturing and financial services. About 48 percent of its revenue comes from the health care industry and 25 percent from government. Its customers include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the military.
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(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
This would mean that both EDS and Perot would cease to exist as stand-along companies. So much for Ross Perot I guess.
I wonder if this has any connection to the recent Dept. of Education migration that Perot did. I was there at the beginning of it, and everyone I talked to said there was no way Perot Systems could make any profit, that in fact they were likely going to lose money on the project because of the tight budget they had to work with. So now HP has EDS, which Ross helped create, and Dell will have Perot. Ol’ Ross isn’t going to have much to do with both of his (former) companies in others’ hands.
There is a book just waiting to be written on how this all works out. I have a hard time understanding how two such different kinds of businesses can be made to act with anything like real team work. The difference between hardware orientation and service/integrator is very, very large. Also, of course, Dell strikes me as a straightforward company. EDS was simply not like that. And I’m being very kind.
Surely all these things have been considered at length by Dell. And good luck to them.
Oh, and as an aside, the Plano campus of Perot, which is a horribly drab former Arco property, is currently livened only by being a virtual museum of things Ross has collected (it’s quite interesting actually, if anyone ever has the chance to walk through the place; they also have a neat computer equipment museum that has 4 of the surviving Univac cabinets, which quietly run through some sort of demo calculation about every 10 minutes or so. The click-click-click of the relays and registers is kind of soothing). If they belong to Dell now, I have to wonder if he’ll have to remove all his stuff.
Say what you want about Ol Ross Perot. He was right about that great sucking sound of jobs leaving the USA.The old man is a genious and a patriot and not too many can boast about achievments as great as he has had.
Just saw the previous post. Now I recall that EDS and Perot are different. But I new EDS when Perot had close, personal control, so I’m guessing my remarks about sorporate personality aren’t too far off.
He's 79. He's a crazy little guy who made a fortune.
Well Ole Ross got rich by writing out his own Invoice to the Government.
Perot bailed on EDS, and went on to found Perot Systems as a competitor. Did pretty well too.
I thought he got that way by being ‘all ears’..
After Perot sold EDS, the business GM gave its EDS subsidiary masked the horrible management there. But then EDS management actually claimed GM was holding them back, and GM agreed to let them go. Once independent, the stench at EDS was too much to ignore. I'm surprised there was anything left that HP would be interested in buying.
Nah, looks like Perot is getting ready for a new start. He built EDS, sold it off, made a ton of cash, then started Perot Systems. He may be thinking PS got too big and isn’t a challenge anymore, and he wants to do it again.
At 79 I think Ross has pretty much turned a lot of the management etc over to his son. They still other stuff such as the Alliance Airport project out of Fort Worth.
LMAO that and as I understand it the lack of competitive bidding, my real problem is he Put the bent one on office.
While politically speaking, I'm no fan of Perot, as a former EDSer, I have to say that Perot has been wildly successful. He built both companies and sold them for vast fortunes. He almost got complete control of GM long before it became Government Motors. If he had won (GM), who knows, Maybe he could have saved them! And who can blame him for not liking the New World Order Bushes?
Id take big eared Ross over obummer any damn day of the week.
My son worked for EDS pre-GM, the original Co.
They treated him right. Even flying him and sick grandson from Fla. to Cleveland on a private jet.
I’ve had nothing but respect as to how Ross treated his employees.
Hated to see him sell EDS.
He had good reason. He sold EDS to GM and got a place within GM where he could still run EDS an independent entity. But Perot clashed wit GM's management, which basically wanted to suck EDS into GM's management mode, and we've all seen how good GM's management is. Basically, old, backwards-thinking, short-sighted management was going to crush the dynamic management of EDS that Perot had thought he could preserve under GM.
He made a big stink and was quietly bought out by GM with motives straight from Beckett, "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" Not bad, in all Perot made 3.2 billion off of the EDS sale.
BTW, bit of trivia, Perot mostly financed Steve Jobs' NeXT company, which made the computers the WWW was invented on, and whose operating system was the precursor to the current Mac OS X.
;-/
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