Perot Systems top dog exits Dell

Peter Altabef – the former president and chief executive officer of Perot Systems and the person who has been running the combine Dell Services unit in the wake of the $3.9bn acquisition of Perot by Dell in September 2009 – has left the company.

Now that the integration of Perot Systems is complete and Dell has a services business with nearly $8bn in annual revenues and more than 43,000 employees, Altabef has decided to leave, according to a statement released by the computer maker and services wannabe.

Steve Schuckenbrock will be talking the helm at the Dell Services unit, which will come as no surprise to anyone. Schuckenbrock was in charge of Dell's Large Enterprise business unit until today and was formerly been Dell's chief information officer as well as a long-time top exec at Electronic Data Systems before that services giant was eaten by Dell rival Hewlett-Packard. (Ironically, H Ross Perot Jr established both EDS and Perot Systems and has done well by selling his companies to General Motors, the public, HP, and Dell).

The Dell Services unit has 60 tech support centers and 36 data centers around the world, and it provides support for over 14 million PCs and 10,000 customers who are running applications SaaS-style from Dell's data centers.

Dell says that the integration of Perot Systems proceeded a little more smoothly than expected, with $100m in cost savings extracted from the combined Dell-Perot services businesses in fiscal 2011 and an additional $150m in "revenue synergies," by which we presume Dell means cross-selling of products and services between formerly independent Dell and Perot customers.

In addition to appointing Schuckenbrock as the president of Dell Services, Dell has merged its Large Enterprise unit, which sells servers, storage, networking gear, and PCs to the top couple thousand of Dell's customers ranked by the revenues they generate, with its Public business unit, which sells the same mix of stuff to federal, state, and local governments.

Paul Bell, who has been at Dell for 15 years and who was president of the Public unit, will be president of the combined Public-Large Enterprise unit. Before running the government-facing unit, Bell ran Dell's operations in EMEA and ran the commercial business in North America and South America before that.

Dell says that the reorganization will be implemented in the first quarter of fiscal 2012, which spans from February through April of this year. Steve Felice, who is president of the Consumer, Small and Medium business unit, retains his position. All three presidents report to Michael Dell, the company's chairman, CEO, and founder. ®