CSC and IBM have announced a collaboration in which IBM will provide its cloud managed services for z Systems — IBM Cloud for z — and associated mainframe hardware, software, monitoring, and governance support to CSC clients who are moving to the cloud and want a more secure, scalable, flexible information technology infrastructure at significantly reduced operational costs.
The expanded alliance further advances CSC's vision of the "Service-Enabled Enterprise" and IBM's "as-a-service" strategy, both designed to increase client choice and innovation in adopting emerging technologies. The as-a-service strategy provides consumption-based pricing for the IBM z Systems environment to give clients' greater capital investment flexibility.
"Many clients are looking for ways to make historically fixed cost more variable to migrate from legacy platforms to modernized applications and to a cloud enabled infrastructure," said Stephen Hilton, CSC's executive vice president & general manager, Global Infrastructure Services. "As a solution independent integrator, CSC is uniquely positioned to leverage transformative services like the IBM Cloud for z to benefit our clients. This new cloud-based service expands our cloud offering and is a natural evolution of our long-standing alliance with IBM. We are very excited to be providing our clients greater choice and capital flexibility when transforming legacy computing to a cloud-like service, and delighted that our close partnership with IBM has enabled us to bring this transformative offering to market."
The agreement builds on an announcement earlier this year that the IBM Cloud is available to CSC clients as an option through CSC's next generation IT services. Integration of the CSC Agility Platform™ with the IBM Cloud will enable clients across multiple industries — including healthcare, insurance and finance — to quickly leverage the benefits of the hybrid cloud and deploy some 10,000 applications that deliver rapid proof of value.
"IBM's ability to bring its world-class strengths in customer service and information technology operations will enable CSC to maximize mainframe efficiencies now and in the future via the IBM Cloud for z," said Philip Guido, GM of IBM Services in North America. "IBM's leadership in next-generation cloud, security, big data, management processes and support aligns with CSC's objectives of leading client digital transformation needs and providing long-term solutions to meet their ever-evolving requirements."
IBM's Cloud for z support of CSC will:
- Enable the right level of computing resources and dynamically adjust capability levels as client needs change
- Provide a predictable pricing model offering increased flexibility
- Offer high levels of secure computing, coupled with configurable options of high availability that can help reduce business risk
- Reduce total cost of computing and IT operations by using a shared infrastructure for software, server, disk, and tape needs
Resiliency services that will be provided to CSC include Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which provides replication, backup and recovery of critical infrastructure, data, and systems to the cloud to enable a rapid recovery of applications and data.
