Outsourcing: Vivek Chopra of Computer Sciences Corp. (Part 4)

By guest author Tony Scott

SaaS and Its Impact on Outsourcing

Tony: So how do you see SaaS and cloud computing ultimately driving the IT landscape, and how will that impact outsourcing companies?

Vivek: SaaS is definitely beginning to establish itself. It’s a little too early to call a win on the cloud front, but fundamentally I think that’s the way the world is moving and where people are putting their investments. There are companies such as Google and Microsoft that are going to be engaging with this from both a partner and a service perspective. We believe that is where the IT arena is going. When you start looking at both infrastructure and applications, applications will be delivered as a service wherever we are. Virtualization is clearly here to stay.

From our perspective at CSC, we are gearing up for it, knowing that we have a strong presence in infrastructure, and we are doing what we can to leverage that infrastructure base. What we are doing on the applications front is trying to industrialize applications. Again, to answer your question, it’s about moving on to the next stage from labor arbitrage to a stage where you are able to deliver applications as a portfolio, charge for them, and then do a certain level of customization on the application depending on the customer’s need.

Tony: So you are looking at productizing these applications? Going back to your own early career, you came from a product background. One of the big issues generally for any company is, how do you balance your mix, and do you see yourself as a company that offers services with some products thrown in, or are you a product company with some services? It’s not an easy transition to move to an ideal balance for companies that have been rooted in one side or the other.  How do you see that impacting what you are doing; how can you ultimately succeed in getting the mix right?

Vivek: If you look at it from CSC’s perspective, if I step into what we believe to be our differentiators for a moment, we feel that the companies that are just labor arbitrage, companies that provide staff augmenting services, will be marginalized over next twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four months. Or, they will find a niche for themselves depending on whether they are able to deliver, because customers will be looking at outcome-based services. Those customers will say: “Take this, deliver to me, virtualize my infrastructure, use the cloud as a base for delivering an application service.” But fundamentally, I think the dynamics of how we’re pricing and delivering applications and infrastructure is going to change. And customers’ gradually recognizing that we have a strong base in infrastructure, recognizing that we understand application services, recognizing that we have tools, frameworks, and processes which we have developed for delivering applications both horizontally and vertically, will help us.

We go to market vertically. We have tweaks which we have made based on customers, their needs, and the vertical, but in general the horizontal infrastructure is delivered as vertical services with vertical tweaks.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Outsourcing: Vivek Chopra of Computer Sciences Corp.
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