CSC Creating a High Profile in the Cloud
News Article -- December 09, 2010
IDC Article
Dec 7, 2010 was a big day for CSC cloud with three important launches: A path for financial services companies getting to the cloud, a supplier relationship management solution in CSC's trusted cloud, and certification as SAP hosting provider in the cloud.
The three offerings are very different and show that CSC wants to play very broadly in the cloud market: helping clients get to the cloud, operate their private solutions there, and offer them more applications there.
The financial services migration story is a smart move from CSC we believe. The "Four Staged Path" describes a very high level roadmap for in principle taking the whole of a financial services company to the cloud, starting the migration with low-risk-non-critical applications such as mail, then getting to the business critical ERP solutions etc. that can fairly easily be migrated and at the top of the migration ladder cloud-enabling the legacy, in-house developed applications. The fourth stage consists of introducing fully new solutions directly into the cloud - this stage runs in parallel with the others. To each step CSC describes a range of services, that can take the client through the process, from business and IT consulting, through implementation and operation.
The interesting thing about the concept is that CSC has tailored the description and the related offering to a key industry sector - financial services, where a lot of activity is happening now to transform the application estate, and where CSC has substantial expertise and engagement.
We think the creation of a framework for full migration, that few if any are likely to make, is a clever way of showing how this is thought through from CSC's side and will work as a strong starting point for discussions in the industry.
The launch of a CloudSRM (cloud based supplier relationship management) solution based on Salesforce.com's cloud platform Force.com is a very different offering: In reality it is an application solution offered on CSC's hosted cloud platform "Trusted Cloud", i.e. a shared hybrid cloud with a private application on top. An interesting aspect is that it is built on the Force.com platform, showing that CSC is working with a host of providers - other solutions are based on Springsource from VMware.
Finally the cloud-hosting of SAP is important in that it enables CSC to compete more strongly in the private cloud market. SAP hosting is very popular in Europe, and CSC already has a substantial activity in the area, but dwarfing the activity of T-Systems and IBM. We discussed IBM's certification to host SAP on cloud and the potential this creates, now CSC follows with an announcement and more are in our view likely to follow.
The three solutions/services from CSC launched on December 2010 and discussed in this article can easily be integrated, CSC states. Even if customers don't plan to buy all three, this indicates what to expect from CSC in the future, and shows the company's commitment to the blended but integrated environments. We believe it is important for service providers to make themselves very visible in the cloud market - at this point in time mind share is as important as market share, and to show relevance to a broad range of potential clients as CSC does with these announcements creates good grounds for growth.