Thread regarding DXC Technology layoffs

@gc Given DXCs track record of delivery. Achieving operational readiness on something Iime this is estimated to be beyond the natural working lifespan of anyone now left in DXC.

@er It's a glorified dashboard ducttaped to a confused chatbot, deployed to the customer accounts under DXC's industry leading 'trust me, bro' standard.

@er what does oasis do?

It's a dashboard of widgets derived from data from various tools (snow and dynatrace at the moment).

It offers different dashboard views depending on the role of the user (customer cio, dxc Windows engineer and others).

Then the ai chatbot can answer human questions about each widget and suggest actions that the operator can approve for agentic execution if any of the widgets indicate something under performing.

It's not a secret, all of that has been demo'ed internally and externally.

It's got a long way to go before it's truly useful though, as it needs a lot more tool connectivity and more knowledge loading into it to provide the correct solutions.

It's been rushed out the door for investor day rather than waiting for anything like fully operational status.

DXC is drowning in bureaucracy, paperwork and multiple outdated and often contradictory processes and policies. Oasis was simply a tool that was about to utilise AI in order to navigate in that mess, because no human mind is able to do this anymore.

Customers want less not more. They certainly want less of DXC. Although some are struggling to let go in any hurry. If oasis was a consulting wing it might have wings. As yet another thing you didn't know you didn't need. It seems doomed.

So far not one person has been able to answer the question

What exactly does Oasis do?

A platform built on …..?
A platform that monitors / plugs into others tools that’s supposed to outperform native tool monitoring?
What else?

@dv DXC is chasing a unicorn that does not exist.

The idea that OASIS magically creates margin assumes there is some giant pool of waste waiting to be squeezed out. In reality, there is no single operating model to optimize. If you have 1000 customers, you have 1000 contracts, 1000 sets of requirements and 1000 different ways of doing business. Every customer is a special snowflake.

Meanwhile, OASIS itself comes with its own ecosystem of overhead. You need infrastructure to run it, people to manage it, teams to deploy it, consultants to explain it, architects to redesign around it and governance committees to debate it. By the time everyone has had their meeting about reducing costs, the cost savings have already been spent.

The irony is that the simplest solution is usually the best and the cheapest: a lean operating model and a straightforward employee rate card. Customers understand it, sales teams can explain it and finance can count it. No branding exercise required.

In many ways, OASIS is the machine designed to reduce costs that costs more than the costs it is trying to reduce. That is not margin expansion. That is administrative cardio.

The funny part is that the logical end state is the exact opposite of what DXC and the most service providers are trying to achieve.

Instead of building layers of proprietary tooling, you invest in consultants who help customers build their own ecosystem using the best tools available in the market. You tell your customers the truth: this approach is better for them in the long run because it gives them flexibility, avoids lock in and lets them replace vendors whenever they choose.

Your value as a service provider is not owning the platform. Your value is delivering good services and helping customers make good decisions and execute effectively.

The result is a much leaner business. No armies of people managing internal platforms. No endless roadmaps for proprietary tooling. No expensive infrastructure to maintain. No marketing campaigns pretending a cost reduction mechanism is a revolutionary product.

And, the real advantage is that there is no need to pretend.

You are not trying to package a discounting mechanism as an innovative product. You are not rebranding standard industry capabilities and presenting them as a breakthrough. You are not asking customers to believe that adding yet another layer of tooling to an already spaghetti-like systems landscape somehow creates value when the same capabilities already exist in the platforms they are trying to migrate to.

You become the cheapest, leanest and meanest operator in the market. While competitors are busy building elaborate systems to convince customers they are indispensable, you are helping customers become independent. Ironically, that is often the fastest way to earn trust and win more business.

Customers are generally very good at spotting the difference between genuine innovation and a reheated and repackaged bullsh-t. The more honest approach is often the more compelling one.

DXC is not particularly honest, genuine, cost effective, innovative or competent but at least nobody can accuse it of falling short on the "mean" part.

@dm I'm no dxc fan but oasis is all about cost/price reduction. Yes that decreases revenue but the revenue never happens in the first place if we are not winning the business in the first place.

Oasis isn't a product sku that customers buy, it's the mechanism by which dxc charges the customer less and uses less humans to service the customer.

Less revenue but more competitive wins and a cost that's lower that has higher margins.

That's the theory anyway.

Also there is a shift to outcome based pricing... Because that is where the market is now.

DXC has all of the right words and right ideas... Just now if the execution is there to go with it...

I’m the OP and this is gold

‘Nobody is going to pay a premium for a patchwork of utilities assembled by a third-tier vendor like DXC when every hyperscaler and serious ITSM platform e.g. ServiceNow has deeper pockets, stronger engineering teams and already delivers the same capabilities out of the box.’

What possibly can DXC develop for servicenow, that servicenow doesn’t already have?

The fundamental flaw in the OASIS branding strategy is the assumption that customers care about OASIS.

They do not.

Customers care about outcomes: lower costs, better performance, and the freedom to switch providers the moment someone else offers a better deal.

Nobody is going to pay a premium for a patchwork of utilities assembled by a third-tier vendor like DXC when every hyperscaler and serious ITSM platform e.g. ServiceNow has deeper pockets, stronger engineering teams and already delivers the same capabilities out of the box.

Platform X, OASIS and similar offerings from other IT service providers have never been premium features. And they never will be.

They are price discount mechanisms packaged as products. Rebranding them does not change what they are and most customers are sophisticated enough to know the difference.

Customers are also increasingly hostile to vendor lock in, particularly when it comes from companies with uncertain long term prospects. The market has little appetite for dependency on vendors whose relevance and viability are constantly being questioned.

The reality is simple: no one bets their business on DXC.

In the end, nobody gives a damn how DXC brands a discounting model or cost optimization framework. Customers want the lowest possible price, a solution that works and the ability to replace the vendor without friction the moment a better alternative emerges.

That is the reality of the market. Ironically, that is also exactly what OASIS is supposed to be

What that means for DXC employees is that the company will continue losing revenue and shrinking, not despite OASIS, but because of it.

By trying to package cost reduction and vendor independence as a differentiated product, DXC is reinforcing the customer behavior that drives down its own revenue. If customers embrace the principles DXC and OASIS promotes, they will standardize on open platforms, reduce dependence on service providers, increase competition among vendors and switch suppliers more easily. Those outcomes benefit customers but they do not create growth for DXC. They compress margins, weaken vendor loyalty and make services increasingly interchangeable.

In effect, DXC is promoting a business model that accelerates commoditization of its own business, making it harder to grow revenue, defend market share or justify premium pricing.

It’s that old saying, If DXC only knew what DXC knows. There are smart people in DXC that know what it is. There are also many in DXC on customer accounts only using customer tools. They don’t really experience DXC core capabilities. They can work their entire career in the customer ecosystem. DXC also has these discrete areas that unfortunately don’t work well together, executive’s fault (e.g. CES, GIS, GBS, insurance, enterprise apps, security, modern workplace,…). Then there are the other executives that routinely misrepresent the company capabilities. That’s the part that drives me crazy. Most of the executives are not smart enough to truly understand. They make it make sense to them and take credit for things they had no hand in, even after they’ve tried to sabotage it. The result is the people trying to understand what it is, can’t figure it out by the way the executives describe it. But they describe themselves it to executives in other companies who don’t want to appear d-mb that they eat it up and have to have it. Executives generalize to a point where things are meaningless to the people who actually make things work. We just let them think they are smart because their position in the company.

If people in DXC dont know what Oasis is then what chance do customers have?

Another white elephant, Raul gets to wing it for a while longer.

Hard to explain without a firm understanding of managed IT services. It’s not a security tool but does adhere to and can help manage security tools. If you implement IT HW and SW you either manage it yourself, at the lower levels, or use other tools to make it manageable. If you subscribe to cloud services you get the building blocks to make things but then still have to make it all manageable. AWS cloud is a good example of buying the pieces that you have to integrate to create large systems. Then AWS also offers AMS, Amazon Managed Services. This gives you access to the Management platform. ServiceNow is another example of tooling to manage IT services. Companies like DXC sell managed services on top of all sorts of infrastructure,including cloud, hybrid, and for business applications. They create tooling ecosystem to enable them to more efficiently manage the full spectrum, which could also be bespoke systems and even out of support HW/SW. the tooling ecosystem will include lots of software from other vendors, including HW vendors, monitoring (e.g. dynatrace), security, ITSM, etc. the IT targets are always moving, and also have to support the legacy. The secret sauce is having some integratabtle platform to bring it all together. Has to be API capable and not. HW/SW vendors try to lock you in to their tools and systems, and that is often impracticable. Unless you have a single stack and single vendor you need the ability to extend, adapt and integrate. So OASIS gives an agnostic cloud platform. Traditional ITSM still has a lot of operator intervention, one way or another. OASIS extends with AI to be able to deal with more complex situations (than restart, ki-l, password reset). It is more than one tool, and put it together in a unified fashion. First it’s being used to enhance operator. Eventually it cab become the operator. IT systems put out a ton of data. Its capabilities go beyond the mundane. I didn’t get into the analytics. Safe to say they are in there and used. This would be better described on a white board. DXC may not go to that level of detail. It has all the components mentioned. You’re likely not going to get a detailed implementation diagram.

So it’s a monitoring platform built on…?

There is nothing special about connecting a Claude agent to servicenow, kids can do it it’s that easy. And getting the agent to trigger an alert if Service now is falling over or having capacity issues…. But even that’s cloud so it has its own monitoring built in.

I’m confused now.

Not sure I understand much of what you have written

What’s the core platform?

Whats the objective?

What does it actually do?

You’ve only said it’s a tool that’s connects to other tool using blurb.

Cloud service orchestration/integration software, with hooks into ServiceNow/PX, which has also been integrated to AI tooling. It has a foundation different, and better than, Platform X, with ability to integrate with other ITSM and/or cloud management tooling. Its core tooling had already been used in many accounts to support SAP and PaaS, as well as public cloud services. What I don’t like is other parts of DXC taking credit for it when they really didn’t contribute much to it.