NSW minister for innovation and better regulation, Victor Dominello, addresses the launch of the combined company.
New York Stock Exchange listed CSC has completed its $428 million acquisition of ASX listed IT services provider UXC, announced in October 2015.
The combined company has annual revenues of about $1.4 billion and employs about 6000 people across Australia and New Zealand — about half from each of CSC and UXC – and has about 2500 customers.
CSC Australia and New Zealand managing director, Seelan Nayagam, said the merger would create some overlap and some positions would go, but the company had 140 positions open and he expected that, if anything there would be a net increase in staff numbers over the next 12 months.
“[UXC] will no longer be a public company so the people who did that work will no longer be needed, but you could count them on two hands,” he said.
Nayagam said UXC’s headquarters would remain in Macquarie Park in Sydney. All UXC brands will adopt unified branding and each will be labelled “a CSC company” with the exception of IT analyst and advisory company Telsyte which will retain its existing branding without the CSC strapline “to maintain market independence” CSC said.
UXC CEO, Chris Nicoli, said he believed UXC to be “number one in cyber [security], number one in Microsoft Dynamics, number one in SAP, number one in Oracle and number one in Service Now and probably number one or two in infrastructure services,” in Australia and New Zealand.
However, he said the acquisition would give the company the resources it needed to grow.
“Much as customers loved working with UXC they were asking us to do more and more, and stretched us further. There was a need for scale, for very strong processes and the need for offshore capability.”
He added: “We did not have the capability to own the balance sheet if people wanted to put their infrastructure into a leasing plan or into the cloud. That next step of growth was always going to be very difficult for UXC. We are now able to take customers on another part of their journey.”
The company will announce a major contract with a NSW public entity next week. Nicoli said UXC had won the deal on its own, but the upcoming acquisition by CSC had helped with implementation.
“We were struggling with some of the transition activities and the CSC acquisition made the customer much more comfortable signing the paperwork … The size of that deal is something we should now be able to do on a regular basis,” Nicoli said.
Nayagam also announced plans to open an innovation centre in Macquarie Park.
“We want to create an environment where you can show the technology evolution towards the digital era,” he said.
This is likely to be close to coinciding with the release of the NSW government’s innovation policy.
NSW minister for innovation and better regulation, Victor Dominello — who spoke at the official launch of the combined company — said the state government would be announcing its innovation statement in the next few months, and he hoped by early May.
