Partners Mull Impact On Services Union

Regardless of whether the merger occurs, John Hitchcock, vice president of marketing and alliances at eForce, said he'd like to discuss opportunities for services partnerships with HP and Compaq executives. "We have technical skills they may not have," he said.

The Hayward, Calif.-based solution provider already has a longstanding partnership with Sun Professional Services. The Sun Microsystems services arm regularly outsources work involving its iPlanet products to eForce, Hitchcock said.

Sun executives said their strategy of outsourcing work to partners helps control the size of the company's services group,now at 3,600 employees, compared with 34,000 for Compaq,and puts partners at ease.

"We focus on the technology platform and implementation," said Mark Bauhaus, vice president of Global Sun ONE Consulting at Sun Professional Services. "Our partners provide outsourcing, business logic, and industry-specific or application-specific context knowledge," he said.

Nick Padgett, CFO of Inforte, a Chicago-based e-services firm, said there's now an abundance of services work for all solution providers, from boutique to enterprise consulting firms.

"In IT services, it has never really been a market-share game, though a few of our peers thought it was and spent a lot of money foolishly thinking that a couple of years ago," Padgett said.

As an independent services firm, EDS has an edge in the market because unlike HP and Compaq's services units, it's not tied to particular products, said a spokesman for the Plano, Texas-based integrator.

The HP and Compaq services businesses are primarily driven by maintenance of their own hardware, hardware revenue and equipment financing, the EDS spokesman said.

MARIE LINGBLOM and ELIZABETH MONTALBANO contributed to this story.