CSC Teams With Amazon On New Cloud Services Play For Enterprise, Government

CSC's cloud push took a giant step forward Tuesday with the unveiling of a new partnership with Amazon. The systems integrator is teaming with Amazon Web Services for what it calls the CSC Global Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE), which is designed to serve enterprise and public sector customers. The Global Cloud CoE, which will be established in Austin, Texas, will focus on helping clients develop and migrate cloud workloads to AWS and integrate various private and hybrid cloud offerings.

"I looked at our cloud strategy and I saw that we had a very good cloud offering for a specific market within the enterprise, but I also saw there were other cloud offerings to address more needs," said Dan Hushon, chief technology officer at CSC. "No one has just one cloud now. They have multiple clouds, so we at CSC wanted to fill in the gaps of our cloud offerings and go with hybrid cloud partnerships."

[Related: CSC Pushes Forward In Enterprise Cloud With ServiceMesh Acquisition ]

The hybrid clouds will include Amazon's services as well as CSC's own private cloud service, dubbed BizCloud, while CSC's ServiceMesh Agility Platform will be used to automate the deployment and management of enterprise applications and platforms on AWS.

"We don't care where our customers want to put their workloads," Hushon said, adding that CSC just wants to make it easier for customers to get to the cloud. CSC will provide the Global Cloud CoE with cloud consulting and integration services as well as additional solutions for areas such as cloud-based data analytics and security.

Amazon, meanwhile, will help CSC develop industry-specific best practices for various verticals and help train CSC engineers and consultants to be certified on AWS.

"We are excited to support CSC's Global Cloud CoE, which provides customers with skilled business and technical resources, and value-added solutions for enterprise-class applications,’ said Terry Wise, director of worldwide partner ecosystem for Amazon Web Services, in a statement. "AWS provides CSC's Global Cloud CoE with training, best practices and reference implementations, along with technical and business support."

The Global Cloud CoE will begin as a virtual center for training CSC staff on AWS with a physical location to open in Austin at a later date. Hushon said the goal is to open a number of centers for the cloud going forward. CSC has "substantially changed" its cloud strategy, Hushon said, starting with the acquisition of cloud management firm ServiceMesh in October. At the time, CSC said it was transforming the business to become a cloud solutions leader rather than have cloud services as just another portfolio offering.

Hushon said CSC had looked at a number of public cloud providers to partner with but ultimately decided Amazon was the right vendor for the job.

"Amazon is innovating faster than anyone else in the public cloud space. They're doing some amazing things right now," Hushon said. "We've been working with them as an Amazon consulting partner for years, so this was the right time to take that to the next level."

That said, Hushon added that CSC will work with other public and hybrid cloud environments through the new Global Cloud CoE and that the company will explore partnerships with additional cloud providers.

"We all share a common goal," Hushon said. "Enterprises are sitting on top of more than $200 billion in enterprise applications that are tied to platforms that aren't sustainable, and the trick is getting them off of those platforms and moving them to the cloud."

PUBLISHED APRIL 29, 2014