Kellwood Renews IT Services Relationship
Electronic Data Systems Corp. (EDS), and the Kellwood Company renew their long-term information technology (IT) services relationship. With the seven-year agreement, EDS will continue to provide a full package of leveraged IT services to support the marketer of apparel and consumer soft goods' future strategy. The financial terms of the agreement are not being disclosed.
"Over the years, our joint teams have demonstrated that IT can have a positive and strategic impact on our business," says W. Lee Capps III, COO for Kellwood. "Moving to this more innovation-friendly delivery model will help us remain agile and a leader in our very competitive and fast-moving industry."
The agreement marks the beginning of the companies' second decade as strategic business allies. Since the relationship began in 1996, EDS has helped Kellwood use IT to improve its ability to manage inventory levels, ordering processes and supply chain.
Michael M. Saunders, Kellwood vice president and CIO adds, "Our goal with EDS is to leverage our partnership to drive innovation while reducing our cost of operations, which allows us to partner on more valued-added initiatives."
EDS will continue to manage Kellwood's IT infrastructure, which includes its midrange computing systems that are located in Kellwood's St. Louis data center, data and information storage environments and the company's communications network. Additionally, EDS will continue using its
The IT infrastructure also includes Kellwood's computing environment for its approximately 3,200 employees in 25 locations, including service desk and support for desktops, printers and mobile computing devices.
This announcement comes just weeks after HP and EDS signed a definitive agreement, under which HP purchased EDS at a price of $25.00 per share, or an enterprise value of approximately $13.9 billion. Combined, the companies' services businesses had annual revenues of more than $38 billion as of the end of each company's 2007 fiscal year.