CSC and HCL announced an alliance a few weeks ago, which is more of a go-to-market than structural change. But what if the twosome were to agree to a follow-on alliance to do something really big — something with huge industry and market consequences? It would be extremely brave and very risky. But it would address the inevitable whopping market threat for CSC and position both companies for future growth. Let me paint a picture of what that speculative alliance would look like.
The alliance would address the elephant in the room: CSC losing half its client work
Such an alliance would first enable CSC to grasp the mantle and really address its big problem — its current huge commitment to an asset-heavy outsourcing model. CSC has invested at least $12+ billion in this model.
Our research and insights reveal that over 50 percent of the workloads currently in an asset-heavy model are able to migrate to the cloud over the next three to five years— and are incented to do so. With half of its work exiting the asset-heavy model, this mass exit would leave CSC with a huge revenue hole.
And that’s only part of the problem. The situation is doubly threatening in that the exit from the asset-heavy model will leave CSC with huge stranded costs on facilities, equipment and people along with the revenue hole.
A really brave alliance with HCL would deal with this situation.
Alliance step one. Step one is to deal with the people. CSC could move its people servicing clients in the asset-heavy model over to HCL, taking costs down and removing the stranded costs. CSC already has a vehicle in its offer set to catch the cloud work but would be replacing this revenue at 50 cents on the dollar. It’s much cheaper to do the work in the cloud than in the asset-heavy model.
Step two. Step two would move CSC’s data centers into an industry REIT to deal with the data center overhang. It would leave CSC with a much smaller set of stranded assets in overhead and equipment to deal with. In this way CSC would be able to navigate the inevitable shrinkage of its asset-heavy business and deal with those stranded assets.
The emerging CSC
A brave alliance between CSC and HCL would also make CSC “all in” on the cannibalization of its own footprint. Although CSC is attempting to drive this strategy now, it has conflicting incentives as it fights to maintain revenue in its existing asset-heavy model while standing up new revenue. The speculative alliance I’m describing would send a message internally to the CSC organization and to its external market that CSC is “all in” on the cloud transformation issue.
What would emerge from this alliance strategy would be a cloud-based CSC — a smaller, more profitable, more nimble CSC without the huge write-downs that it likely will incur as the cloud transformation happens naturally over the next few years.
The picture for HCL also makes a lot of sense
Such an alliance would create big growth in HCL’s infrastructure because of gaining significant advantages in economies of scale, market credibility and greater profits to invest.
HCL would pick up CSC as a huge client and capture probably 15 percent of the entire RIMO (Remote Infrastructure Management Outsourcing) market in one fell swoop. It would cement HCL into the undisputed RIMO leadership position with a wide margin between HCL and TCS, its nearest competitor.
What do you think? Will the twosome be brave and take the risk of a market-changing follow-on alliance?
