DXC EVP Mike Nefkens: New Company Unlocks AWS Goldmine For HPE Enterprise Services Customers

DXC Technology EVP Mike Nefkens said gaining access to CSC's 1,000 AWS experts will provide HPE Enterprise Services customers with a "lightspeed jump" in its capabilities around the public cloud powerhouse.

"I'm coming from the HPE side, and I'm … just jumping up and down about being able to offer AWS to our customers," Nefkens told CRN exclusively. "It would have taken HPE alone probably two to three years to develop the relationship which CSC has with AWS now. So this is a lightspeed jump for us."

HPE Enterprise Services was much slower to adopt AWS than CSC due to HPE's longstanding relationship with Microsoft, Nefkens said. As a result, Nefkens said just 10 percent of HPE ES's public cloud business went to AWS, while CSC enjoyed a more equal 50:50 split between its AWS and Microsoft offerings.

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"We're just going to see more balance and more choice for our customers, which creates a healthier environment," said Nefkens, who will lead DXC's sales and business development efforts. "It's going to feel different for our customers starting today."

DXC officially opened for business on Monday as an entity with 170,000 employees and $26 billion of annual sales, after the Saturday close of the CSC-HPE ES merger. The company's stock is up $1.27 (1.84%) to $70.47 in early afternoon trading on DXC's first day.

Legacy HPE ES customers will be able to tap into a much deeper set of vendors as part of DXC, Nefkens said, gaining access for the first time to companies such as ServiceNow and Oracle. HPE will be a premier DXC partner and will be featured prominently in many of the company's solutions, but Nefkens said customers now have more choice around which vendors they use.

"Access to other vendors almost forces HPE to be more competitive from a quality and a price perspective going forward as well," Nefkens said. "It's about bringing the best solutions to our customers."

Greater technology independence will allow DXC to keep up with the best-of-breed products in the marketplace, Nefkens said, rather than relying on components in a solution that might not be as highly regarded.

DXC has pushed out its AWS private cloud to legacy HPE ES customers, Nefkens said, to serve as a stepping-stone to the vendor's public cloud capabilities. DXC is offering customers the ability to both shift workloads right away to AWS as well as to more gradually move them into an AWS-type environment, Nefkens said.

HPE ES customers will be able to tap into CSC's relationship with Racemi to quickly and inexpensively migrate infrastructure or operations to AWS, according to Dan Hushon, DXC's chief technology officer. DXC will also offer customers looking to migrate to AWS a full set of managed services as well as a cloud access and security broker architecture to get help through any regulatory hurdles, Hushon told CRN.

A large percentage of DXC's 1,000 AWS-certified employees hold professional-level certificates, which Hushon said require four-to-six months in a very intensive continuous education program.

Hushon said CSC's offerings are immediately available to traditional HPE ES customers (and vice versa). He said this required a huge investment over the past 10 months around integrating the offering portfolio, building and pricing sales collateral, training the sales team, and positioning the products effectively from a strategic standpoint.

"We've been doing a lot of planning, Hushon said. "We now have the trusted advisors now at DXC to drive this."