Sun Microsystems

For more than 20 years, Sun Microsystems has been at the forefront of technology innovation, and the company is currently undergoing a major transformation that is changing the way it does business. To remain competitive globally, Sun is handing much of the responsibility for its application development and support to CSC. Sun will also build on CSC's contract base and industry experience to go to market more effectively.

The results have been favorable. "We're currently having a pretty positive outsourcing experience," says Bill Vass, Sun's Chief Information Officer. "CSC has been very responsive, very on-board." The transition involves some 850 Sun employees that are being outsourced to CSC, a majority of them to offshore locations. Sun and CSC are establishing a development center in India where skilled applications professionals are being trained in applying Sun solutions, and Sun will be able to tap into this pool of talent, depending on their needs. Once the transition is complete, CSC will manage Sun's full portfolio of internal business systems applications.

Improved flexibility, cost savings

"The transition is the most aggressive outsourcing that's ever been done at CSC," says Mary Vaughn, CSC's account executive for Sun Microsystems. "This has been a huge program that requires infrastructure, hardware set-up, and network connectivity, loading up the application environment and getting the people hired and trained. It's a very large and complex program that needs to be completed in a very short nine-month time frame."

For Sun, Vass says the key business drivers for the transition are that it provides his company increased flexibility and significant cost savings. "Once we finish the transition, we can scale up and scale down much faster with CSC than we could with in-house personnel. CSC has 78,000 employees to pull from and we had, at the time, about 1,200 people to pull from," Vass says, adding, "We also have a much more diverse skill set we have access to." Vass estimates that the outsourcing agreement will bring Sun "about a 35 percent cost savings over us doing it ourselves."

As the industry standard bearer for network computing and the developer of essential leading-edge technologies such as Java, Sun is no stranger to innovation. And in managing this outsourcing engagement, Vass says Sun is instilling a healthy dose. "We built a lot of innovation into the contract around Service Level Agreements," Vass says. "We have an automated dashboard that continuously delivers to me things like availability, application performance, delivery of schedule, delivery of projects, standard of compliance."

Success through collaboration

Tom Kenyon, a vice president with CSC's Global Transformation Solutions group, says the success of the relationship has been built around effective collaboration. "It has been a truly joint effort between both Sun and CSC to make this outsourcing program successful to date," Kenyon says. "What's really made it successful is both sides working very hard and having jointly aligned goals and management teams to really move the effort forward."

Vaughn says another key innovation has been the implementation of a trademarked management concept she has developed known as the interdependent operating model, which addresses the behavioral aspects of an outsourcing relationship. "What I've noticed on different outsourcing accounts is that when you're doing a big transformation effort like this, some people are going to resist it," she says. Close attention to promoting interdependent behavior is imperative, Vaughn adds. "You need to get people aligned around a vision. In this case, it's around CSC's value proposition. You need to get people working together to help you achieve that."

Enhancing go-to-market strategies

CSC's working relationship with Sun spans more than a decade and goes well beyond this massive outsourcing undertaking. The two companies are also strengthening their longstanding business partnership and developing a comprehensive go-to-market strategy that serves the marketplace on a number of different levels.

First, CSC is helping Sun gain access to the federal market, and the two companies are exploring ways that Sun's secure server environment can help federal agencies, most notably in the sensitive area of intelligence. Sun and CSC are also seeking to leverage knowledge gained on major enterprise resource planning initiatives such as the U.S. Army Logistics Modernization Program, which is considered to be the largest SAP implementation ever undertaken and runs almost entirely on a Sun hardware platform. Finally, Sun is exploring ways to leverage technology developed in CSC's 18 Centers of Excellence and is working closely with CSC in areas such as storage, utility computing and grid computing.

Vass adds, "I think it has to be a strong partnership. There's been a lot of senior management attention to ensure that it goes well. You have to look at their success as your success, because that's what it is. If you go into an adversarial relationship, where you're each pulling the contract out every time you're in a meeting, then you've got a problem. CSC has been very good to work with in that way."