Dive Brief

• DXC Technology will serve as the exclusive managed services provider for Primary's Zero Trust control plane, a platform designed to govern what AI agents can reach inside an enterprise, the two companies said on Aug. 6. 
• Primary licenses its software directly to customers, but DXC will add “legacy infrastructure modernization, including the planned decommissioning of redundant VPNs and VDIs” to the managed services offering, Dawn-Marie Vaughan, cybersecurity global offering lead at DXC, told Channel Dive via email. DXC will provide a services wrapper that includes consulting, 24/7 managed security operations, architecture integration and the migration itself.
• DXC holds no equity in Primary but has a “deeply aligned, strategic commercial relationship” that includes co-innovation work and accelerated deployment programs, Vaughan added.

Dive Insight

Decommissioning VPNs and VDIs is unglamorous work that has been sitting on enterprise roadmaps for years. The work gets more interesting when tied to AI governance, currently one of the channel’s hottest topics.

Few enterprises have enough AI agents in production today to justify buying a dedicated control plane just for them. But almost every large organization has a remote access estate it is tired of paying for. DXC’s Primary partnership puts those two projects in the same work order. The large services firm wraps a startup's product into a package, and the margins come from the migration rather than the license.

Primary is a small New York-based company with no disclosed outside funding and an unusually senior security bench, including former DARPA chief information officer and Twitter security head Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, who runs a unit called Primary Labs.

Prior to the partnership, Primary sold a secure enterprise browser at getprimary.com, complete with data loss prevention, AI-driven classification and extension controls. Gartner has said secure enterprise browsers can reduce reliance on VPNs, VDI and desktop-as-a-service, and expects adoption to reach 25% of organizations by 2028, up from roughly 10%. Selling browser security is tough and the market’s crowded. However, packaging it as the control layer for enterprise AI, delivered by a company with global managed services, is a different conversation that taps into a potentially larger budget.

The announcement came on the last day of Black Hat USA, where Primary exhibited, and six days after an earnings report that knocked a few bucks off DXC's market cap. The company’s first quarter fiscal 2027 revenue was $3 billion, down 5.1% year over year and 6.7% organically, and its shares fell roughly 9% after the July 30 report.

DXC promoted its in-house agentic security operations work, which it said cuts analyst handling time from 80 minutes to four in a presentation accompanying its July 30 earnings call. Enterprise security is the growth story DXC wants investors to hear.

The choice of Primary is a head-scratcher. DXC could have built its AI agent governance practice around Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks or Microsoft. Vaughan's case for Primary is that incumbents “retrofit AI governance after the fact” while Primary was purpose-built for it. 

DXC did not say whether the joint offering is generally available or in early access; it hasn’t named a reference customer and hasn’t yet said where in an AI workflow the enforcement actually happens.

But the services giant is confident in the value it’s adding. “Deploying enterprise-grade Zero Trust and AI governance requires far more than software licensing,” Vaughan said. “DXC acts as the bridge that takes Primary's control plane technology and turns it into a fully governed, production-ready operational environment.”