With the announcement Monday that Xerox Corp. is buying Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services Inc. in a deal valued at $6.4 billion, the big three local outsourcing companies are all presumably ending their lives as stand-alone entities.

For the Dallas area, where the outsourcing industry was born nearly half a century ago, it means the almost simultaneous disappearance of three iconic corporate names: Electronic Data Systems Corp., Perot Systems Corp. and now ACS.

Xerox and ACS said Monday that, at least initially, little would change at ACS.

It will operate as a separate division under the name "ACS, a Xerox Company," much as EDS did before Hewlett-Packard Co. retired the EDS name altogether last week.

Neither ACS nor Xerox commented publicly Monday on the possibility of layoffs, although at least some cuts to eliminate duplicate positions appear inevitable.

Employees just have to wait to see whether Xerox slashes thousands of jobs, as HP has done with EDS, or adopts a less aggressive approach, as Dell Inc. is expected to do with Perot.

Some analysts said Monday that the aggressive cost-cutting numbers promised Monday by Xerox _ $300 million to $400 million over the first three years after the deal closes _ suggest significant belt-tightening is coming.

"That's a very big number," said Peter Bendor-Samuel, chief executive officer of Everest Group, a Dallas-based outsourcing consulting firm.

But Bendor-Samuel praised Xerox as a good home for ACS, as did Joseph Walent, an analyst who tracks ACS for Technology Business Research Inc.

"In the end, I think what you have are two companies that are really striving to provide business efficiencies to their customers," Walent said. "If that can be the overriding theme to the integration, they'll be a formidable force."

"The name Xerox, although it's been in decline recently, is very much a household name," he said.