The New Zealand and Australian operations of EDS will not - for the time being at least - be affected by a pruning of staff in US EDS offices, said Sydney-based EDS spokesman Brian Finn.

EDS will cut 2000 jobs, or about 1.4 per cent of its workforce, chief executive Dick Brown announced last week. The move is due to a "spending slowdown" and unrelated to the IT service provider's relationship with the disgraced WorldCom, the company said.

"Obviously there are more [consequences] to work through, but at the moment these moves are confined to North America," Finn said.

Australia and New Zealand have already been through "a rebalancing exercise", he said. Rebalancing means aligning the workforce with workloads and the more successful areas of the company's business.