Dell To Acquire Perot Systems
Dell announced this morning that it will acquire Perot Systems Corporation for $3.9 billion. The all-cash transaction is expected to close in the November to January time frame.
The $30 per share offer for Perot represents a 68% price premium to Friday’s close.
Perot will become a services unit within Dell as it attempts to diversify beyond hardware sales. Perot President and CEO Peter Altabef will say on, Dell says.
I was surprised Perot stood on its own this long considering other moves in the industry (HP/EDS).
In the most recent quarter, healthcare accounted for 48% of Perot’s total revenue. They’re not just diversifying beyond hardware sales, they’re continuing their push into healthcare.
I wonder if there will be any issues reconciling Dell’s recent partnership with eClinicalWorks with Perot’s long-standing relationship with athenahealth?
Strange acquisition. I suspect this will be a step in the road until an offshore company buys Dell.
Ross and Michael chatting about this on SquakBox this morning:
http://www.executiveinterviews.net/players/mini/default.asp?order=U12954
This merger appears to be targeting HP+EDS as well as IBM.
Specifically for Healthcare IT, wondering if now Dell will support other EMR’s besides eClinicalWorks, such as NextGen, MedFlow and AllScripts – in addition to AthenaHealth and their already mentioned relationship to Perot.
I have met Dell’s CTO (who left recently) and feel that they have a decent “cloud” strategy which would synergize well with PerotSystems’ processes for datacenters, resulting in a packaged service for remote storage and access to medical records. This, in turn, positions the new company for tele-medicine, e-prescribing.
Once again, Dell plays follow the leader. HP bought a Plano-based services company, so Mikey did too.
RE impact of Perot’s exisiting partnerships, I wonder how this will play out with Meditech and the Meditech Solutions group?