DXC Technology maintains strong relationships with leading tech providers while remaining vendor-agnostic to deliver tailored solutions that align with customer goals. Seelan Nayagam, President, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, DXC Technology, tells us how the company prioritises strategic alignment and co-creation with partners to ensure innovation and scalability for their clients across industries.
How does DXC balance being vendor-agnostic while maintaining strong relationships with leading technology providers?
For DXC, technology is not the end goal, but a means to build better futures for our customers, colleagues, communities and the environment.
This mindset is what enables us to remain vendor-agnostic. We focus first on understanding each customer’s desired outcomes, then identifying the most effective technology to achieve them. At the same time, we maintain strong, strategic relationships with the world’s leading technology providers such as AWS, ServiceNow, SAP, Oracle, Dell Technologies and many others.
Through joint business objectives, investments, innovation and co-development with our partners, we enable our customers to harness the power of the technology at scale and transform their businesses.
Our customers can trust that our recommendations are tailored to their needs, not dictated by vendor preferences, while also knowing we have the expertise to deliver the full potential of the technologies we deploy. We also bring differentiated value to our customers through the depth of our global partnerships. This isn’t just in technology capabilities, but in commercial leverage, industry-specific use cases, and joint innovation frameworks. This global and local scale allows us to reduce the cost and risk of implementing new technologies while accelerating time to value.
We invest significantly in developing skills on our partners’ platforms. For instance, Dynatrace recently named us their Global Partner of the Year, recognising that we bring unparalleled scale and expertise to their ecosystem, with one of the largest investments in Dynatrace talent across the IT industry.
Our Innovation Centres serve as co-creation hubs, where customers, DXC experts, and partners come together to test, validate and scale ideas using real-world data and challenges. It’s through these spaces that we help customers unlock the full potential of technologies like AI and cloud, aligned to their business goals. We have both the scale and credibility that customers, as well as technology vendors, look for in a trusted partner.
When designing solutions for customers, what criteria do you prioritise in selecting the right technology partner?
We select our partners based on strategic alignment, technical excellence and the ability to co-create value for clients. We prioritise partners that complement our mission to deliver transformative IT solutions, especially those with strong capabilities in cloud, AI, security and automation. Certifications, proven delivery track records, and innovation potential are key factors in the vetting process.
Global reach and scalability are also essential, as DXC serves enterprise clients across diverse industries and geographies. Partners must be able to support complex, mission-critical systems and collaborate on joint go-to-market strategies.
The ecosystem thrives on co-development, shared objectives, and continuous performance evaluation through certifications, customer success, and industry recognition. Our AI Workbench isa good example of this. It brings together leading partner capabilities, including AWS and Microsoft, to help organisations rapidly explore, test and deploy AI use cases tailored to their industry.
Can you walk us through a recent project where DXC acted as the bridge between customer needs and the right vendor solution?
One example that demonstrates this is our work with Ventia. As a large essential infrastructure service provider, their business is heavily reliant on successfully responding to highly complex tenders. Each proposal must be tailored, accurate, and timely, especially when bidding for large-scale, multi-million-dollar contracts. But assembling these responses often involved manually sourcing information from vast document libraries, a process that could take days and tie up valuable resources.
We partnered with them to transform this critical process using AI and cloud technologies. Together we developed Tendia, an AI-powered bid writing solution built on AWS services including Amazon Bedrock, Fargate, Kendra and Cognito. The platform was trained on Ventia’s previous submissions and internal knowledge base, enabling it to understand context, source relevant information quickly and generate draft responses in minutes.
The results have been significant. Ventia has not only cut bid preparation time drastically, but also improved the quality and consistency of proposals. More importantly, it has freed up their teams to focus on higher-value, strategic thinking, which gives them a competitive edge in a fast-moving market. It’s a clear example of how the right technology, aligned with business goals, can open up new possibilities.
How do you ensure that your recommendations remain unbiased and focused solely on the customer’s best interests?
This relies on deeply embedding client priorities into our decision-making processes. We prioritise the customer in every engagement, tailoring solutions to meet their specific business needs, rather than promoting any particular technology or vendor. For instance, in our partnership with Parfois, we focused on delivering personalised, data-driven insights using the Snowflake platform, not because of vendor preference, but because it best served the client’s operational and strategic goals.
Moreover, we foster co-creation and transparency with our clients, often working collaboratively to define the right mix of technologies. This approach is evident in customer stories where DXC has helped organisations like United Airlines and Syngenta modernise infrastructure and deploy AI solutions that were selected based not on vendor affiliations, but on performance, scalability, and relevance to the client’s mission. By aligning our recommendations with measurable outcomes and customer feedback, we maintain a strong focus on delivering value without bias.
In what ways does DXC add value beyond technology selection—particularly in integration, change management or long-term strategy?
Many organisations discover that deploying a technology solution is only the first step. At DXC, we embed AI, automation, and industry-specific IP through platforms like our AI Workbench, to help customers scale innovation sustainably. And through our Innovation Centres, we work side-by-side with clients and partners to co-develop capabilities that are resilient, scalable and future-ready. Moreover, we are committed to enabling our clients to realise the full potential of the solutions they invest in. This requires on-going expertise, integration and continuous innovation.
Daiichi Sankyo, a global pharmaceutical company, serves as a perfect example. They had implemented ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) years earlier which over time evolved into a common global platform. More countries began deployment and the number of managed applications began to rise, resulting in an increased operation and maintenance workload for their IT employees. This is when they approved DXC as their ServiceNow ITSM global maintenance partner, not just to keep the platform running, but to transform it into a true strategic asset.
We helped them enhance and integrate ServiceNow into wider business processes, unlocking data-driven insights and driving greater agility across the organisation. We enabled them to achieve efficiencies, improve decision-making, and find ways to continually adapt the platform to support their evolving business needs. That is the essence of our approach. We stay invested in our customers’ long-term success, not just their initial implementation.
With so many new vendors entering the market, how does DXC evaluate and onboard emerging players into your partner ecosystem?
We follow a strategic, value-driven approach that emphasises innovation, scalability and alignment with customer needs. While we maintain strong relationships with established players like Microsoft and Dell Technologies, we also actively seek out emerging technology providers that enhance our ability to deliver cutting-edge solutions across industries.
The onboarding process typically involves collaborative solution development, where we work closely with new partners to co-design and implement integrated platforms tailored to specific client challenges. For example, in a recent engagement with a global manufacturer, we leveraged our ecosystem, including both established and newer partners, to deploy a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) stack that enabled real-time data processing and factory-floor optimisation.
This approach ensures that new vendors are carefully selected based on their ability to contribute to DXC’s mission of delivering measurable business outcomes. Our emphasis on joint innovation, global scalability, and customer-centric design helps ensure that every partner, emerging or established, adds tangible value to the ecosystem.
What trends are you seeing in customer expectations from channel partners, and how is DXC evolving to meet them?
The expectations of large enterprises in the Middle East and Africa are markedly different from those of smaller businesses. Our customers, which include some of the region’s leading brands, expect their technology partners to demonstrate proven expertise, scale and resilience.
At this level, pedigree matters. DXC’s 30-plus years of experience in the region, a presence in 10 strategically located cities across Middle East and Africa, and the ability to draw on our regional delivery centres and multi-lingual talent pool, gives customers confidence that we can deliver complex, business-critical programmes at scale.
We are also seeing ESG move to the top of the agenda. With the UAE and Egypt being among the most recent hosts of the landmark COP summits, and the relatively recent introduction of unified ESG disclosure metrics by the GCC Exchanges Committee, the bar has been raised. Enterprises are no longer just looking at their own operations, but also considering their partners’ commitments to sustainability and inclusion.
With a 58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions since FY19, procuring nearly 40% of our electricity from renewable sources, and recycling or reusing 99% of our e-waste, DXC has a competitive advantage. We also bring this expertise into the solutions we deliver, helping customers embed ESG principles into their own transformation initiatives.
Customers can be assured they are working with a partner that not only shares their technology vision but can also help them realise it in a sustainable and inclusive way.
