Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu held a news conference in the city to announce a "significant economic development."
Edwards announced that DXC Technology, based out of Virginia, is expected to expand its company to the Crescent City.
"Louisiana's greatest days lie ahead and DXC technology, their strong presence right here in the Central Business District of New Orleans represents a bold powerful new step in that direction," Edwards said.
DXC has also established more than 250 industry-leading global Partner Network relationships, including 15 strategic partners: Amazon Web Services, AT&T, Dell EMC, HCL, Hitachi, HPE, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Micro Focus, Microsoft, Oracle, PwC, SAP and ServiceNow. DXC is also now a publicly traded information technology company that was created last year after acquiring parts from the Enterprise Services segment of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The company is promising to locate 2,000 new jobs to its new digital transformation center to the city, with the first 300 hitting by the end of 2018.
The state is putting up a $120 million package of incentives to lure DXC to New Orleans. The package includes $25 million to train potential DXC employees at Louisiana universities and community colleges. Some of the training would take place at LSU, UNO and Delgado.
University of New Orleans President Dr. John Nicklow says they've been a partner in this deal. He could not be happier about what this means for his students.
"We are engaged with our STEM, science technology, engineering and math fields, our computer science department, our accounting and finance and business. We've engaged all of those individuals and they're already prepping," Dr. Nicklow said.
Krista Lawrence is the department chair for Computer Information Technology at Delgado.
"On the books, we have 350 declared majors," Lawrence said.
Within those majors, the school is preparing their students for industries like DXC. Many of their students, Lawrence says, have a lot to offer.
"We do have the traditional student, but the non-traditional students, they bring so much to the table as well. So, they may already have life experiences, worked somewhere else in a different field, or may have been in the military and they come here to Delgado and they bring all of that to the table. And they're ready to go," Lawrence said.
