CSC Gains Cloud Management Capabilities With ServiceMesh

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CSC, which is often compared to better-known cloud services Amazon, Google and Rackspace, has acquired ServiceMesh to expand its cloud management offerings.

While Falls Church, Va.-based CSC makes fewer headlines, it's one of only two suppliers listed in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) leaders. The other is Amazon Web Services. Other suppliers listed just outside the quadrant include Verizon Terremark, Joyent, IBM/SoftLayer, CenturyLink Savvis, Rackspace, Tier 3, Microsoft and Dimension Data.

CSC, formerly known as Computer Sciences Corp., has rapidly built up cloud services based on Vblocks, the prebuilt racks of Cisco Unified Computing System servers with VMware virtualization.

CSC did not announce what it's paying for the privately held ServiceMesh, but the Santa Monica, Calif., company probably came with a substantial price tag. It has built a reputation for its application-centric Agility Platform, which has been engineered to use the Puppet configuration engine and VMware-based workloads. It can take an application running in a VMware virtual machine and prepare it for deployment to VMware's Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service, to CSC, to Microsoft Azure or to Rackspace's Xen-based OpenStack cloud.

[ Want to learn more about what ServiceMesh does? See ServiceMesh Cloud Tools Get Cozier With DevOps. ]

There are few providers of multicloud deployment capabilities. Acquiring ServiceMesh moves CSC one step back from being a heavily VMware-oriented IaaS based on Vblocks, and one step forward toward being a hybrid cloud service broker. That is, it can both import and export workloads from a variety of enterprise environments and serve as the public cloud provider for them.

"The future of next generation IT infrastructure will involve a set of multiple clouds utilized simultaneously" by the enterprise, said CSC CEO Mike Lawrie, in the announcement of the acquisition. ServiceMesh gives CSC a service catalog that lets it assess enterprise applications, then orchestrate them to run in a suitable public cloud destination. CSC itself provides infrastructure for a private cloud operation on bare metal, a private virtual cloud, or a public, multi-tenant cloud.

The 140-employee ServiceMesh's customers include Switzerland's Swisscom telecommunications service and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.