Hot on the heels of its acquisition of Infochimps, CSC announced this week it is snapping up cloud management concern ServiceMesh.
CSC, often more known as Computer Sciences Corp., is somewhat of a legacy company that is hoping to move its IT and professional services customers onto new cloud platforms.
The firm pulled in $13.5 billion in revenue over the last 12 months, and has some 81,000 employees. The company does need a little lift, if its most recent quarter is any indication. Revenue was $3.19 billion, but this was a 9 percent decline when compared with the previous year’s quarter.
Meanwhile the company’s cloud vision encompasses both richness and complexity. “The future of next-generation IT infrastructure will involve a set of multiple clouds utilized simultaneously by enterprises,” said CSC President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Lawrie. “ServiceMesh allows us to catalog enterprise applications and orchestrate those applications dynamically to run in different clouds based on the characteristics of the applications. From our unique position as an independent global technology company, we will integrate those workloads for our clients through our portfolio of services and technologies.”
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Service provider customers seem on board, and one is building an entire set of new cloud offerings with CSC’s help. “We are pleased to see ServiceMesh and CSC come together,” said Swisscom IT Services' Chief Executive Officer Andreas Koenig. “Swisscom is building its next-generation cloud offerings with the ServiceMesh Agility Platform, and now together with CSC, we are enthusiastic about the prospect of accelerating our partnership on a global basis.”
An end user customer is also looking forward to the benefits of ServiceMesh’s new owner. “The ServiceMesh Agility Platform is a foundational element of our cloud operating model,” said Commonwealth Bank of Australia's Chief Information Officer Michael Harte. “Now the combination of ServiceMesh and CSC will further strengthen and accelerate enterprise IT transformations and drive significant value, not just from productivity gains and cost savings but, moreover, by providing an ecosystem for innovation across enterprises.”
CSC Revamp
While technically still Computer Sciences Corp., the company prefers to be called CSC which may sound a tad more modern. And just less than two years ago the company recast its strategy and leadership. Since then the aim has been to go after big areas of growth such as big data, the cloud, new generation applications and cyber security. Acquisitions are part of this revamp, including not just ServiceMesh and big data vendor Infochimps, but 42Six Solutions, another big data company.
Infochimps provides what it calls big data platform-as-a-service (do we call this BPaaS)?
The Infochimps Cloud for Big Data has three main components, batch Hadoop, streaming and real-time processing, and the ability to run ad hoc queries with these analytics leading to actions and decisions.
CSC may be big, but it has big competition in big data. Don’t forget, Amazon AWS includes a big data service. “Amazon Elastic MapReduce provides a managed, easy to use analytics platform built around the powerful Hadoop framework. Focus on your map/reduce queries and take advantage of the broad ecosystem of Hadoop tools, while deploying to a high scale, secure infrastructure platform,” Amazon explained.
Even if CCS can handle Amazon, there is another giant in the field – Microsoft. Windows Azure HDInsight is “a Big Data solution powered by Apache Hadoop. Surface those insights from all types of data to business users through Microsoft Excel,” said Microsoft of its Excel-centric approach.
One reason so many major players are playing in big data? Big money. IDC says “the worldwide Big Data technology and services market will grow at a 31.7% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) – about seven times the rate of the overall information and communication technology (ICT) market – with revenues reaching $23.8 billion in 2016,” the research house wrote. “The Big Data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and startups vie for customers and market share, providing technology buyers with more opportunities to use Big Data technology to improve operational efficiency and to drive innovation. Additionally, major IT vendors are increasingly offering both database solutions and configurations supporting Big Data by evolving their own products as well as by acquisition.”
