At a Glance

  • DXC Technology will serve as the exclusive managed service provider for Primary's zero-trust control plane. The platform is designed to govern the scope of what AI agents can access within an enterprise,the companies announced on August 6。
  • Primary licenses its software directly to customers, but DXC will add "legacy infrastructure modernization, including planned VPN and VDI retirements," to the managed service, Dawn-Marie Vaughan, global product leader for cybersecurity at DXC, told Channel Dive in an email. DXC will offer a service package that includes consulting, 24/7 managed security operations, architecture integration, and the migration itself.
  • Vaughan added that DXC does not hold an equity stake in Primary, but the two have a "deeply aligned strategic commercial relationship," including joint innovation efforts and plans to accelerate deployments.

Deep Dive

Retiring VPNs and VDIs is unglamorous work that has lingered on enterprise roadmaps for years. When tied to AI governance, the work becomes more compelling — and AI governance is one of the hottest topics in the channel right now.

Few enterprises today have enough AI agents running in production to justify buying a dedicated control plane just for them. But nearly every large organization has a remote access estate it is tired of paying for. The DXC-Primary partnership puts both projects on the same work order. The large services firm packages the startup's product as a solution, profiting from the migration rather than the license.

Primary is a small New York-based company with no disclosed outside funding and an unusually seniorsecurity team, including former DARPA CIO and Twitter security chief Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, who runs a unit called Primary Labs.

Before this partnership, Primary sold a secure enterprise browser through getprimary.com with data loss prevention, AI-driven classification, and extended controls. Gartner has said secure enterprise browsers canreduce reliance on VPNs, VDIs, and desktop-as-a-service, and expects adoption to rise from about 10% to 25% by 2028. Selling browser security is not easy; the market is crowded. But packaging it as a control layer for enterprise AI, delivered by a company with global managed services, is a different conversation that could tap into larger budget pools.

The announcement came on thelast day of Black Hat USA, where Primary had a presence; six days earlier, DXC's earnings had wiped hundreds of millions off its market cap. The company's fiscal Q1 2027 revenue was $3 billion,down 5.1% year over year, with an organic decline of 6.7%, and shares fell about 9% after the July 30 earnings release.

DXC has touted its internal agentic security operations work, saying in apresentation accompanying its July 30 earnings callthat it cut analyst processing time from 80 minutes to 4. Enterprise security is the growth story DXC wants investors to hear.

The choice of Primary is puzzling. DXC could have built its AI agent governance practice around Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, or Microsoft. Vaughan's rationale for Primary is that existing vendors are "retrofitting AI governance," while Primary was built for the purpose.

DXC did not say whether the joint offering is generally available or in early access; no reference customers were announced, nor was it specified where in AI workflows enforcement policies are applied.

But the services giant is confident in its ability to add value. "Deploying enterprise-grade zero trust and AI governance requires far more than software licensing," Vaughan said. "DXC acts as the bridge, turning Primary's control plane technology into a fully governed, production-ready operational environment."