Seelan Nayagam - Managing Director A/NZ, DXC Technology
Just months after its official launch, DXC Technology has captured more than 250 technology solutions providers in its partner ecosystem, amid efforts to put platforms at the centre of its new life as a top tier tech player.
The official launch and public listing of DXC Technology, the IT services company arising from the spin-merger of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Enterprise Services (ES) business and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), came on 3 April.
Now, as the integration of the two companies leads to some measure of consolidation within its operational footprint and office space globally – and locally – the individual partner ranks of the pre-merged companies are combining to form an increasingly hefty and far-reaching ecosystem.
Under its new brand, the company claims at least 16 global strategic partners, with whom it co-invests to engineer new offerings, sales and client delivery.
These strategic partners include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Dell EMC, Hitachi, VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), HP Inc., IBM, Lenovo, Oracle, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), SAP, ServiceNow and, of course, Microsoft.
Meanwhile, the company also has a growing number of global and regional solution partners, including RedHat, Citrix, Symantec, Veritas, Riverbed, Trend Micro, Cisco, Check Point, Hortonworks, CrowdStrike and others.
In short, DXC Technology’s solution partners are critical to the company’s digital transformation capabilities.
These partners are aligned based on their specialised expertise, according to the company, and are aimed at helping it to deliver “innovative solutions that solve complex, critical client challenges driven by the increasing demands of the digital world”.
“We lean-in together with our partners and treat them as part of DXC. We co-sell, co-solution, co-deliver,” DXC Technology Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) managing director, Seelan Nayagam, said.
“We offer our clients a vendor agnostic, 'best of breed' platform choice. Yet at the same time, irrespective of which platform our clients choose, we bring very deep, locally-based expertise to the table."
A/NZ partner landscape foundations
Prior to its emergence as DXC Technology, CSC acquired Australia’s UXC – along with all of its associated businesses, such as UXC Eclipse, UXC Connect and UXC Red Rock. The acquisition helped to build out CSC's application platform capabilities further across SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.
Now, DXC Technology claims the acquisition, and the capabilities that came with it, positions the company to assist end clients on both sides of the Tasman across best of breed platforms, with an integrated “build, sell, deliver” capability aligned to a single partner technology.
Meanwhile, DXC Technology claims that its individual integrated practices maintain close relationships with their respective partners, and have attained the “highest levels” of certifications in the region for both reselling and services.
For other partners not covered by its integrated practices, DXC Technology is working with its global offering leads to identify the technology stacks present in its offerings, which certifications are required for these within A/NZ, and which can be drawn upon from the company’s global resources.
CSC's existing partner ecosystem had already clearly positioned the company well to take on the enterprise end of the market – a major goal in its post-merger journey as DXC Technology.
Earlier this year, the company picked up some big wins in the local market, such as the $394.2 million end user computing contract CSC struck with the South Australian (SA) Government, prior to its re-emergence as DXC Technology.
Building a platform presence
DXC Technology’s partner ecosystem plays a major part in the company’s emerging focus on platforms and how they fit in with the changing needs of the broader market.
“Platforms are the go-to business model due to their ability to plug and play and consume services,” Nayagam said. “This agility allows organisations to embrace an ever-widening network, or ecosystem, of contributors to their value creation.
“DXC [is] enabling this for our clients through our partnering approach, which is one the key pillars of our strategy."
As DXC Technology chairman, president and CEO, Mike Lawrie, said at the company’s Investor Day event on 29 March, “we made a huge investment in our partners”.
“We really bet the farm on our partners so that we could leverage their [research and development], leverage their routes to market and present a much different set of independent objective best-of-breed offerings to our clients,” he said at the time.
The big differentiator for DXC Technology, according to Lawrie, is the way the company approaches its partner network and the organisations that are part of it.
“We don't approach partners as a subcontractor,” he said. “Many of our clients can't differentiate us versus our partners because of that attitude and it is an attitudinal approach.”
