“We have a goal to double our services business in three years, and that will make us number two in that market, but IBM will still be bigger.”

HP UK managing director Steve Gill revealed this objective to me in an interview with Computing in February 2004. It seems he was only a year or so too ambitious.

Now that HP’s $13.9bn acquisition of EDS is going ahead, it will establish the combined company as global number two in IT services and outsourcing.

The previous year, in May 2003 on the first anniversary of HP’s £12bn acquisition of Compaq, Gill predicted that the firm would overtake IBM as the world’s biggest technology supplier within the next year.

This milestone took a little longer – until 2007 – and needed IBM to sell its PC business to Lenovo along the way, but nonetheless HP got there.

For a company that has, at times, hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons – a spying scandal in 2006 that led to the departure of chairwoman Patricia Dunn; the ousting of former chief executive Carly Fiorina; the acrimonious purchase of Compaq against the wishes of one of HP’s founders’ family – current chief executive Mark Hurd has quietly gone about doing the business in the areas that matter.

HP is today a very different beast from the rather fuddy-duddy firm that entered the new millennium and had its foundations shaken during Fiorina’s often controversial tenure.

The combination with EDS will  give HP serious presence in every major boardroom conversation about IT - and lead to fevered speculation about further mergers in the sector.

Watch out for moves by the big Indian outsourcers to buy second-tier US or European rivals such as Atos Origin, Logica or CSC. Will even Accenture find itself a target – or decide it has to be an acquisitor – to compete long term with IBM and a joint HP/EDS?

And don’t rule out HP from further quiet but influential purchases along the way.

I wonder what Steve Gill is predicting now?