EDS Unveils MyCOE On-Demand Provisioning Portal

The myCOE (my Consistent Office Environment) portal is a critical component of the outsourcing giant's on-demand computing strategy, said Julie Brown, offerings manager for myCOE.

EDS worked with Microsoft on the product, but the myCOE environment supports provisioning for Sun Microsystems' StarOffice and other legacy or business applications, Brown said.

A key component of the myCOE platform is Microsoft's new zero touch Solution Accelerator For Business Desktop Deployment (BDD), which is designed to reduce the deployment time for Windows XP, Office XP and Office 2003 by as much as 75 percent (see story).

Brown said EDS' new offering is an all-encompassing, end-to-end on-demand offering aimed at providing EDS customers with everything from software provisioning to billing in one portal.

The myCOE offering will be priced similar to a utility service, with a monthly bill plus fees for additional services or software subscriptions that will be based on usage or period of use, Brown said.

The myCOE offering can price offerings on a per-incident or capacity rate structure for consumption services such as storage, help desk and online training.

The EDS myCOE offering has been designed to move corporate IT spending from a fixed cost to a variable cost based on usage, Brown said. "We think the impact can be significant," she said.

Analysts estimate that anywhere from 6 percent to 20 percent of companies will adopt some form of utility computing this year, Brown said. She said that could jump from 20 percent to 40 percent over the next several years. The key to the success of the model is for companies such as EDS to be able to demonstrate the "significant cost savings" that can be achieved by using the utility model rather than a one-size-fits-all IT purchase, Brown said.

Brown said the big attraction of the on-demand model is the ability for customers to "take capital assets off the books" and employ contracts that move software licenses and equipment leases into services contracts.

Carol Wyatt, global offering executive for EDS' Distributed Systems Services line, said the company is already using the myCOE tool to migrate 7,000 to 8,000 desktop systems to XP for one client. Furthermore, she said there is a "very significant pipeline of interest" in the MyCOE offering.

The myCOE offering opens the door for more flexibility for companies and even individuals on how applications are deployed and billed, she said. For example, a group within a company collaborating on a specific project could provision and pay for an application for a set period, said Wyatt.

With many Microsoft customers already having XP licensing agreements, myCOE is not an attempt to impinge upon those licensing or subscription deals but rather an attempt to "enable as much variability as we can," Wyatt said.

"As the industry starts bringing out more offerings on a variable basis, we will have the infrastructure that enables that," Wyatt said.

The Microsoft and EDS sales teams are working together to migrate more clients to XP. "We think there will be a significant uptake or increase in people implementing deployment through the next 18 months," she said.