HP has issued a statement confirming its intent to purchase services giant EDS. On one hand, this makes great sense, as Hewlett Packard has been building towards this vision of developing a fully integrated business solution over the last several years, instead of a vendor of boxes, storage, switches, and peripherals. In a world where the mid-market is the new competitive battleground, a move to build a very strong business solution practice, complete with a strong services offering puts HP in a very strong competitive position.

But, as Information Week's Paul McDougall states in his article, it's not a slam dunk. Where IBM has shifted their focus to rest squarely in the enterprise space, HP still sports a strong consumer division as well, and this diversity might be a distraction to the new HP/EDS venture.

In talking with several major companies in the data center technology space to build out our Next Data Center event in October, I've seen more and more of a push to define the whole system solution, instead of supply a piece part for integrators to mix and match. Where virtualization is now a near-given in most operations, network companies, storage companies, and computing environments have all branched out to build their fully integrated play in this space.

What's your take? Are you looking for a business-process driven solution to your hardware and infrastructure needs? Or are you still building from the piece-parts method. Send mail to [email protected] and tell me how YOU view your data center environment these days.