For Morris was outsourced herself when CSC (Computer Sciences Corp) won a large contract at General Dynamics 12 years ago to take over a major part of its information technology (IT) function.

"That's when I joined CSC," Morris told Show News. Now she runs the CSC group responsible for all outsourcing of IT in the Americas, including aerospace. She recently took over the role from Paul Cofoni, who now heads up the Federal outsourcing business.

Both are here at Le Bourget, with other CSC executives, to rub antennae with existing clients and to persuade prospective ones to join the fold. For the first time they have chalet space, a share in exhibit facilitator Tom Kallman's International Chalet.

The company has its European headquarters in the United Kingdom at Brennan House, Farnborough in the BAE Systems Centre.

"Outsourcing has been a major growth engine for CSC," says Morris, growing from $300 million with General Dynamics in 1991 to accounting for 42%, or nearly $4.5 billion, of CSC's current revenues of $10.5 billion a year. For the second year running, CSC has won nearly $11 billion in contracts, with Federal and aerospace outsourcing playing a major role.

"The last year was incredible in terms of growth," Morris says. "We closed some major contracts with AT&T, Nortel Networks, Raytheon, and an extension to our contract at BAE Systems." An increasing number of companies are seeing the benefits of outsourcing their IT and related functions to save costs, improve efficiency, and to better interact with their customers.

CSC has an impressive aerospace client list that was kick-started with General Dynamics' massive divestitures when it restructured in the early 1990s. CSC had contracts with six of the eight business units that were sold, and it stayed with them as they came under the ownership of Lockheed, Hughes, Raytheon, Martin Marietta and Marconi. Those contracts have since grown into business worth some $1.1 billion, and they've given CSC entrée to the top tier of the aerospace industry.

Among this year's wins are Alenia Marconi Systems in the UK with a multimillion-dollar, six-year IT agreement to manage desktop computing, help desks, midrange services, application management, procurement and LAN network services, as well as provision of professional services for the implementation of SAP across Alenia Marconi's UK operations.

CSC also won a $350 million, eight-year extension of an existing outsourcing agreement with Raytheon Company to provide support for more than 26,000 desktops at selected sites in California, Arizona and Washington, D.C. CSC already manages a significant portion of Raytheon's IT infrastructure, including mainframes and data centers in Texas and Massachusetts, help-desk support serving 90,000 users, and network operations that include voice services and telecommunications.

And in the last few months CSC went live at Pratt & Whitney under a $2.1 billion contract that's been extended to include Pratt & Whitney Canada and UTC.

"We continue to add value to our aerospace clients by helping them take costs out of operations, " Morris says. "We go beyond IT; we are fundamentally a technology company, so we bring to bear advances in technology that relate to them in all areas, such as e-business. For example, we have worked with one client on setting up a portal for spares, set up web hosting for another client, and we're very active in implementing ERP systems for just about every one of our clients.

"We take into account how they can leverage technology to create value not only in IT, but across the whole of their business."

By John Morris