What's the HP acquisition of EDS about, and what does it mean for CIOs?

Nick Carr says, "[HP CEO Mark] Hurd doesn't have his head in the clouds. His concerns are altogether earthly." That is, it's not about building cloud-computing capacity, at least in the near term, but about achieving economies of scale for more traditional outsourcing: "This deal is likely to set off an aggressive period of acquisitions in IT outsourcing - just as we've seen in recent years in enterprise software. Make hay before the sun sets." More analysis in a similar vein here.

Om Malik sees it as a hardware-as-a-service play.

WSJ says tech execs love the deal, which is seen as a challenge to IBM.

Silicon Alley Insider looks at the financials.