In 1962, EDS started with just one part-time employee - Ross Perot - and no clients. That same year, Perot's former employer - IBM - had 120,000 employees and $2 billion in revenues. By the end of the 1960s, one of these two companies pioneered the burgeoning new field of health care data processing. And it wasn't IBM.
In a Unique One-Time Opportunity, more than 50 EDSers share the story of the one-of-a-kind corporate culture that enabled this tiny speck of a Texas company to tap into the explosion that occurred when business needs - Medicare and Medicaid - and technology - mainframes and programming - converged.
"EDS pioneered the concept of taking over data center operations for a corporate client, hiring its personnel, assuming its computer leases, and assuming responsibility for the software updates and all the applications programs. In essence, it was your stereotypical outsourcing contract, only outsourcing didn't exist. At that time, it was inconceivable that total responsibility for a major corporate data processing center could be farmed out to an outside, independent entity such as computer services firm. Then EDS did it. And the fact that it was an emerging niche entity such as EDS that created the whole idea and the market, not a stalwart like IBM, made it so much more astonishing upon reflection several decades later."
-Stephen McClellan, C.F.A.
Hall of Fame Investment Analyst
