Bill Thomas Biography
- Senior Vice President, Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA)
Bill Thomas is senior vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region for EDS, an HP company. The EMEA region serves a wide range of clients across all industries, providing information technology, transformation, applications and business process services. Thomas reports directly to President and Chief Executive Officer Ron Rittenmeyer.
Thomas has more than 27 years' experience in the IT services marketplace. For the last six years, he has led the EDS EMEA business, most recently as executive vice president, and he served as a member of the EDS Executive Committee.
With annual revenue in excess of $7 billion, an employee base of 40,000 and a geographic footprint covering 36 countries, EMEA was EDS’ second largest region and consistently one of its fastest growing. He led the team responsible for the acquisition of Vistorm and STBA, the business process outsourcing arm of Spanish bank Caixa Galicia. This team also concluded a number of key outsourcing contracts, including Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) [the largest outsourcing contract ever signed in EMEA], Vodafone and Shell. Thomas also championed the formation of EDS’ Global Defence Advisory Council.
Previous to his current role, Thomas was regional vice president of EDS UK and Ireland, a $3 billion business serving most Whitehall departments as well as a wide range of commercial customers. During this time, Thomas also served as a key member of a task force formed by the EDS chairman focused on transforming EDS to achieve a $2 billion productivity improvement.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, Thomas was the global account director for the EDS Rolls-Royce account. At Rolls-Royce, he led the EDS team involved in the complete business process reengineering of that company’s global operation, the design and implementation of new enterprise IT systems, and the development of a new global IT infrastructure.
Thomas joined EDS through the acquisition of SD-Scicon, where he was responsible for founding a group that specialized in advanced computing architectures and pattern recognition. This group focused on transferring military computing techniques into the civilian market, for example, the patented Sentinel computer vision system.
Thomas began his career as a consultant and project manager working on parallel processing systems, cardiovascular/ultrasound systems, security monitoring systems and military signal processing systems. He entered the computing industry after spending two years of research into the development of military radar systems with Marconi.
A recognized authority in IT-enabled business transformation and programme and change management, Thomas contributes thought leadership to both public and private sector organizations. In 2008, he was instrumental in the launch of the International Centre for Programme Management (ICPM) at Cranfield University – a full-time research facility aimed at developing expertise in program and project management.
Thomas has chaired EDS UK for nine years, and is currently co-chair of the EDS Global Government and Defence industry, a member of the supervisory board of EDS GmBH and a member of the Presidents Committee of the CBI. He holds a B.Sc with honours in mathematics from Leeds University, an M.Sc in digital systems from Brunel University, an MBA from the Cranfield School of Management and an honorary D.Sc from the City University London.
Last update September 2008