DXC Technology’s Karim Jeribi on working with Lloyd’s, Manchester United, and digital transformation 

SPONSORED - A sweeping restructuring and new leadership at DXC Technology have resulted in a more customer-focussed company for the IT service provider, which serves clients ranging from Lloyd’s, to United Airlines, to the UK Ministry of Defence. As President and CEO Mike Salvino put it on a recent earnings call: "If you can show up with the right, skilled people at the client's doorstep you're going to win the work. They really want to see the skills. So, we have invested, we built the bench; we’ve got a team of operators that is very good."

To customers, DXC and its transformation journey (which has included a steady rise in net promoter score as reforms bed in) are a known quantity. Not everyone is familiar with the depth and breadth of the company however. The Stack sat down with Karim Jeribi, DXC Technology's VP of Sales for the EMEA region, to learn more:

What does DXC do?

We are a global IT services company that builds and operates mission critical technology for over 6,000 customers across the private and public sectors globally. We work to help modernize customer operations and drive innovation across their entire IT estate.  Our offerings fall into two different types of services.

Through Global Infrastructure Services (GIS) we help customers with the management of their IT infrastructure, delivering services across security, cloud, IT outsourcing and modern workplace. Our Global Business Services (GBS) business meanwhile supports mission critical Business Process Outsourcing, analytics and engineering, application management, and consulting.

Our global service centers enable us to solve complex technology challenges and transform our customers’ businesses.

We have experienced, globally distributed teams and rich engineering skills. That means DXC can competitively help with cost, regulatory, language and business continuity requirements.

Who are you working with at the moment?

DXC works with many of the world’s leading organizations across public and private sectors. The mission critical nature of the work we deliver depends on long-term relationships and customer intimacy.

A great example is our strategic partnership with Lloyd’s of London, the International Underwriting Association (IUA) and the London Market insurance companies. These organizations make up the world’s largest insurance center, representing 7.6% of the global commercial reinsurance market, employing 47,000 people across the UK, and making up almost a quarter of the City of London’s GDP.

Our role there is to rearchitect the London insurance market’s entire IT system and develop a cloud-native digital platform running on AWS to replace the legacy mainframes, while automating manual processes. It’s one of the most ambitious IT transformations in the world currently, and DXC is the lead IT service provider.

Elsewhere, we’re working through Luxoft, a company we bought in 2019, to provide services to many of the world’s leading automotive companies. For example, we work with BMW to help deliver and simplify data analysis and algorithmic training to reduce the time and cost to market for autonomous vehicles.

In the banking industry, DXC cooperated with PKO Bank Polski -- the largest Polish bank -- to develop a mobile ‘bank in your pocket’ solution called IKO. The solution enables PKO’s nearly 7 million consumers as well as business customers to perform single-click purchasing, contactless payments and other value added services. The IKO application is the most popular mobile banking application in Poland, ranking #1 in app stores.

In manufacturing, DXC has supported Alstom by moving more than 1,000 VMs and mission-critical business applications to the public cloud enabling them to focus on delivering green and smart mobility solutions.

And in Italy, we are working with the Italian Ministry of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility to help the government agency streamline the registration process for the owners of 59 million vehicles.

Our recently announced partnership with Manchester United  is one of the club’s most strategic partnerships in its 144-year history. As the club’s digital transformation partner, DXC will help Man Utd to become more data driven and optimize its digital offering to fans, helping to improve the way they engage and interact with the club.

These are just a few examples of the important work we do across the EMEA region.

What differentiates you from rivals like Atos and Kyndryl?

The IT industry is experiencing long-term transformation, with the global shift to the cloud enabling more innovation and agility while at same time cannibalizing the IT outsourcing industry.

While a number of our competitors are still in transformation amid this shift, DXC is five years in.

Many are splitting their businesses, but at DXC we believe CIOs need partners that can address their requirements holistically. That’s why we continue to invest in Global Infrastructure Services, helping our customers modernize and secure investments in their IT estate. At the same time, we are working to grow DXC Global Business Services which now represents about half of our global revenues.

Many of the CIOs we speak with are keen to build skills in-house. What are your views on that?

We typically work with two types of CIO that see IT as a differentiator for their business. The first is willing to partner with us to run their IT silently while modernizing to become more agile and to get to the cloud. The others see DXC as an extension of their own inhouse IT capabilities and we bring them the talent they need to manage and transform their operations. In either case, I think businesses will continue to invest holistically across their IT estate and CIOs will continue to rely on trustworthy partners with a broad skills base to help them to grow.

A great example is VW Cariad, the automotive software company of Volkswagen Group. CARIAD is on a journey to grow its inhouse competences in automotive software and engineering to accelerate innovation for the car company. To get there, CARIAD has turned to DXC's Luxoft, a global leader in the field. Luxoft is helping to train thousands of software engineers at CARIAD to speed time to market and personalize customer experience for all Volkswagen brands.

DXC in the past took some stick for being aggressively focused on cost-cutting. How has leadership and strategy changed in recent years?

As part of our transformation journey we are committed to growing a resilient business focused on taking care of our people and customers, optimizing costs and seizing the market. When our CEO Mike Salvino joined in September 2019, he established a "playbook" to transform DXC in depth. The principle is simple, to accelerate growth let's take care of our employees and listen more to our customers to meet their needs. Since then, we have made huge strides to transform the company and today 75% of DXC’s senior leadership team is new. These new leaders came in, each with their own successful track record in the industry, and together with the established DXC leadership team, we are moving forward with our transformation journey. Including my time at HPE (one of DXC’s parent companies), I’ve been at DXC Technology for 18 years now, and I can say that I’ve experienced real positive change in the culture here. What I’ve realized is that if you really focus on delivering excellence for your customers and your people, you grow.

Mike introduced a people-first strategy which is making a big difference for us. People at DXC are our differentiator. We are proud of our ability to attract, grow and deploy the best people to our customers.

What’s DXC’s role in the Cloud market, and what services do you provide?

At DXC, we talk about "Cloud Right", which means that our approach to digital transformation is not led by technology we want to sell. We are vendor agnostic. Instead, we focus on business goals and support our customers in making the right technology investments at the right time and on the right platforms to drive innovation, customer loyalty and grow their business.

This investment can be made on the mainframe, on-premise, or cloud, whether private, public or hybrid. Whatever is best for our customers, we will support them in their journeys.

We offer true hybrid cloud capabilities and work with all the leading cloud providers including Microsoft, AWS, Google, IBM, RedHat and VMware to migrate 65,000 workloads to the cloud each year.

We also manage 163 mainframes, running 671,000 MIPS. This puts us at the forefront of discussions with our customers about their cloud strategy and allows us speak from a position of deep experience; we support optimization, simplification and migration.

How do you think your customers across EMEA see you?

The business and government leaders I meet need us and trust us to help realize major transformations. We leverage an ecosystem of more than 200 leading technology partners, co-innovating to achieve our customers’ ambitions faster. We are an honest, down-to-earth and collaborative partner, designing and implementing built-to-run solutions, working shoulder to shoulder with them to get the job done.

We are seen as a safe pair of hands trusted by leading organizations in long term relationships, allowing them to secure and modernize their IT and operations. The best evidence is the duration of our relationship with our top 70 customers in EMEA that equates to more than a millennium. That puts us at the heart of technology discussions and in a great position for growth.

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