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CSC, Pratt & Whitney negotiate services deal

Computer Sciences is flying high again with a nod to negotiate a huge five-year outsourcing contract with aerospace giant Pratt & Whitney.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
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Computer Sciences is flying high again with a nod to negotiate a huge five-year outsourcing contract with aerospace giant Pratt & Whitney.

East Hartford, Connecticut based Pratt & Whitney said today it has picked CSC over rivals IBM Global, EDS, and others, to negotiate a contract worth a possible $1 billion for outsourcing the majority of its IT systems, including management of an SAP R/3 installation.

"Overall [CSC] looked to have the best experience and skill sets to fill our needs," said Pratt & Whitney spokesman Mark Sullivan, noting CSC's background working within the aerospace industry. That experience includes past deals with NASA, General Dynamics, Hughes Electronics, and British Aerospace.

Pratt & Whitney, owned by United Technologies, has 700 IT employees and a technology budget of several hundred million dollars annually, Sullivan said. The company reported $7.87 billion in sales last year.

The contract, if awarded, will be added to a recent string of deals awarded to El Segundo, California-based CSC, including the U.S. Postal Service, the Internal Revenue Service, and the General Services Administration.

"CSC is beating EDS over the head on government contracts," said Julie Giera, analyst at Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "It used to be almost a given that EDS would get these contracts."

EDS did recently snag the right to negotiate a coveted $1 billion contract to privatize computer systems for the State of Connecticut, among a host of other recent deals.

Sullivan said Pratt & Whitney, which sells aircraft to NASA, the military, and commercial airlines, hopes to get the contract signed with CSC within the next several months, though no deadline has been set.

CSC's aerospace sector provides management consulting, systems integration, outsourcing, SAP implementation, client server, legacy systems management, data warehousing, custom software, and engineering services.