Dell wants to flog off the company to pay for his take-over of EMC and it seems that Cognizant, NTT Data and Atos SE are fighting for the outfit.

Perot Systems is major provider of IT consulting to hospitals and government departments. Founded in 1988 by former US presidential candidate Ross Perot, it was acquired by Dell in 2009 for $3.9 billion.

Dell wants to sell the outfit for at least $5 billion, helping it trim its debt load following its agreement to acquire data storage company EMC Corp for $66 billion.

Getting rid of Perot has taken longer than expected because the offers Dell has received thus far have failed to meet its valuation expectations, the people said.

Some of that is because Dell may not pass on some of its contracts Perot has already won to sweeten the deal. It is now having a rethink in this issue.

Dell does not really need Perot as it is focused on making inroads in cloud computing, business software and data management alongside its hardware operations.