Perspecta, the new company formally created last month by combining Vencore with DXC Technology's U.S. public sector business and KeyPoint Government Solutions, will be able to pursue $10 billion to $15 billion more in work through its combined capabilities and increased scale, the contractor's chief executive said last week.
In an interview at Perspecta's Chantilly, VA, headquarters, Mac Curtis, who previously led Vencore, said the new combination significantly bolsters the potential pipeline of work and allows the company to take on bigger contracts.
At Vencore, which had about $1.2 billion in annual sales, pursuing some of the largest programs amounted to making a very "big bet," Curtis said.
"You could probably only do one of those every three or four years," he said. "What you're doing is saying, 'Hey, I'm going to the baseball game, you're down 2-0, and I've got to have two home runs.' So it's a big bet."
Perspecta's annual sales now total about $4.2 billion, including DXC's roughly $2.8 billion in revenue and another $200 million from KeyPoint. The combined contractor has about 14,000 employees.
"You still have to make the appropriate decisions, but there's nothing in the government space from a size perspective we can't go after," Curtis said.
He said the company's pipeline of potential work is worth about $65 billion to $70 billion. Roughly $10 billion to $15 billion of that represents work the companies would not have been able to chase independently, he added.
Curtis said the three companies are melding well. Vencore was created in 2010 with the divestiture of Lockheed's enterprise integration group. The contractor purchased Applied Communication Sciences, whose origins trace back to Bell Laboratories, in 2013, and, in 2014, picked up the QinetiQ North America services and solutions business.
DXC was created in 2017 by combining Computer Sciences Corp. with Hewlett Packard Enterprise's enterprise services business. The public sector business that was combined with Vencore and KeyPoint has roots in the EDS business acquired by HP in 2008.
Curtis said Perspecta respects the legacy companies, but is focused on creating a common culture.
"It's time to depart," he said. "There's a confluence where you're saying, 'We will no longer talk about the predecessor companies,' and I think we'll do that sooner than later."
The KeyPoint business is known for its expertise in processing background investigations. Curtis said he sees new opportunities for that work as the government is reconsidering its approach to security clearances, and KeyPoint now has access to Vencore and DXC technology.
"You think about the KeyPoint process, you think about their understanding of how this works, and then you look at what we can bring to the party from a data analytics perspective with the work . . . we do for the intelligence community," he said. "You think about the computing power something like this is going to take."
The company recently won a Defense Information Systems Agency deal to prototype a case management platform for the National Background Investigations System.
Curtis also said Perspecta is open to small acquisitions that might contribute, for instance, key technologies.
"We're certainly opportunistic," he said. "The tuck-in acquisitions -- they're good because they keep the innovation engine fresh."
He said the contractor is evaluating whether pieces of its business don't fit, but said much of that reshaping work has already been done given that Vencore and DXC were built from legacy businesses.
"There's nothing that really sticks out," Curtis said.
As the company focuses on new work, it's also readying for several key recompetitions, including the Navy's Next Generation Enterprise Network -- or NGEN -- program.
That effort "was a huge piece of [DXC's U.S. public sector business], and it's a big piece of this business," Curtis said.
"That's a gotta-have," he added. "You've got to win that."