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CSC's Perfect Storm
Don St. John
 Every business wants that one period where everything seems to go right-a perfect storm of deals, so to speak. Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) came pretty close over the past week. The IT-services and -outsourcing giant locked up deals with Sears, Roebuck and Co. and the Maryland Department of Transportation; nailed down the essence of a similar agreement with insurance/risk-management firm Aon; and made the cut for a potentially lucrative batch of enterprise resource-planning contracts that the Defense Department will award in the near future.
In fact, the only fly in the week's ointment was losing out to Accenture on the Department of Homeland Security's Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) border-security project (and, at $5 billion, not the best deal to lose). But CSC should have plenty to keep it busy over the coming years. The firm had also recently reached agreements on outsourcing and services projects with both NASA and Scandinavian airline operator SAS Group, and the Sears deal is particularly a nice consolation prize: At $1.6 billion over the next 10 years to handle the legendary retailer's IT operations, CSC is assured of a nice revenue stream for years to come.
The various CSC deals, along with such recent agreements as IBM's sourcing contract with natural-gas producer Williams, heralds the continued move toward big-money, soup-to-nuts services and outsourcing deals among top-tier providers. Large providers, such as IBM and CSC, as well as competitors, such as Perot Systems, EDS, Accenture and Hewlett-Packard, are increasingly able to offer a full turnkey batch of services to large enterprises. Those firms, in turn, are becoming increasingly comfortable with handing over the bulk of their IT operations (and, typically, the employees that come with them) to the large outsourcers. Increasingly, the keys to the IT kingdom can be found in the hands of your friendly neighborhood outsourcing giant.
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