Growth Drivers | September 16, 2025
By Holland Barry, CTO, Cloud and Infrastructure at DXC
In today’s fast-changing business landscape, enterprise leaders are facing tough challenges that threaten their ability to innovate, grow and stay competitive.
Aging infrastructure, failed AI investments and productivity hurdles across remote and on-site teams. For CIOs, CTOs and IT leaders, these challenges aren’t just minor inconveniences, but ones that demand bold, strategic action to overcome.
In my webinar, Powering What’s Next: 2025 Business transformation through technology, I explore some of the critical challenges that leaders are facing and how forward-thinking companies are turning these challenges into opportunities for success.
Below are some key takeaways:
From legacy applications to tangled infrastructure, technical debt is impeding progress, making modernization slow, costly and frustrating for organizations trying to innovate. And many organizations are spending more time and money managing this debt than innovating because complex architectures and outdated processes make modernization painfully slow.
IT teams are spending more just to keep systems running smoothly, as software and maintenance costs eat into budgets meant for innovation.
Organizations face an innovation-maintenance paradox: advancing technology while maintaining existing systems.
The problem is that many organizations have systems and data silos in place that were not designed with modern AI capabilities in mind. These systems often lack the scalability and flexibility required to support AI workloads, making it challenging to integrate new technologies or update existing ones.
Up-to-date systems can better handle the processing power and data demands of AI applications and custom AI solutions, ensuring improved performance and scalability.
A successful modernization project is far more than a simple upgrade; it’s a strategic, holistic transformation designed to boost efficiency, scalability and user experience. It begins with the disciplined work of implementing a proven framework and applying the right technology at the right time.
DXC's approach is to start with a clear strategy and an in-depth discovery of applications, infrastructure and processes. Then we assess budgets, analyze all project dimensions, and review applications to ensure a seamless path forward.
Flying 5,000 planes a day and serving 500,000 passengers, United Airlines operates at a massive scale. To keep operations seamless and elevate the travel experience, United partnered with DXC to modernize its core infrastructure to ensure critical operations run smoothly.
An MIT study found that 95% of AI pilot projects either fail or fall way short of whatever the project goals were. The study revealed that the real challenge was not the AI technology itself, but the difficulty of integrating it into existing enterprise systems and workflows.
Our experience indicates that many companies pursue AI for its own sake rather than starting with a clear business problem to solve.
DXC’s team of consultants and engineers understand the unique ways that clients in different industries can use AI to solve real business problems. We take a pragmatic approach to AI by focusing on developing solutions that solve real-world challenges and support business growth.
While hybrid work is here to stay, it brings real challenges. Remote and hybrid teams collaborate less effectively, IT support requests are rising, and many software licenses go unused—wasting money that could fund innovation. Organizations also struggle with fragmented tools, aging equipment and inconsistent work setups.
Research shows that companies that excel in hybrid work do more than just provide the same tools across all locations. They’re intentional about when and where employees come together and how technology supports them.
By integrating work technologies and optimizing physical and digital spaces, these companies reduce employee friction and frustration while significantly boosting productivity.
Winning teams have learned that the savings from well-planned IT investments can be redirected to fuel innovation, whether that’s AI initiatives or paying down technical debt.
And when AI is properly deployed, it makes distributed teams more productive, and productive teams, in turn, reduce operational costs while enabling further innovation.
Even hardware updates can unlock massive gains. Modern servers can consolidate up to seven systems into one and shrink data footprints by as much as five times, reducing licensing, support and power costs while making management easier.
Holland Barry is the global field CTO for DXC Technology, overseeing technical pre-sales across DXC’s cloud, ITO and cybersecurity business.
