Atos Aims to Orchestrate the As-a-Service Economy

Atos just held its first ever global analyst event in North America to showcase its ambitions following on the acquisition of Xerox’ ITO business, Unify and the Worldline IPO all in the last year. As a result, Atos will have  passed the $13 billion mark in 2016. The central theme in the Boston event was Atos as the orchestrator for innovation to accelerate clients’ journey toward the As-a-Service Economy or the Digital Journey as Atos phrased it. With this approach, branded Digital EDGE, Atos is aiming to carve out a clear demarcation between commodity leaders delivering IaaS and offshore capabilities on the one hand and application centric leaders around R&D (and Capex) intensive SaaS plays on the other hand.

To pursue this strategy, Atos is placing two bold bets in its core Managed Services business that currently accounts for more than half of overall revenue with over $6 billion turnover, with the US being its largest geography. First, it is standardizing its service delivery on ServiceNow, not only for ITSM centric activities but across all business functions. In line with its positioning, Atos was strongly emphasizing that the need to orchestrate the continuing complexity of legacy environments is not going away any time soon. Second, these orchestration capabilities are directly linked to Autonomics solutions from Arago and IPsoft including piloting virtual agent technologies such as IPsoft’s Amelia platform to deliver service desk support to replace Level 1+ agents. In the words of Atos’s executives” Autonomics is ready for the prime time. We expect efficiency gains in incident management of up 50% over two years. Prevention will be the next frontier.” This holistic approach is enhanced by an exclusive partnership with ClickFox to analyze support tickets for end-user computing within the notion of the journey of the customer.

By standardizing on ServiceNow and by putting Autonomics front and center, Atos is placing bold bets to be seen as an innovator globally. However, the service provider has to now demonstrate how it is driving the change management to deliver these services both internally as well as for clients. Atos’ assertion, “we are not HP or IBM, we don’t sign cheques for people to leave” has to stand up to scrutiny. Accelerating automation will require new and higher level skill sets. The success of those initiatives will depend on people, process and technology. By actively putting automation center stage, Atos is going pushing the boundaries of what it means today to deliver intelligent automation.

The strategy to industrialize and automate service delivery is further enhanced by Atos investments to develop differentiating IP around security and software-designed data centers. Atos has consistently placed security as a fundamental element of its strategy and its value proposition. At the event, we saw clear signs that it continues to mature its position and offerings through a strong focus on trust and risk, an approach we feel is necessary to deal with the significant impact of both cyber security threats and digital transformation through the Information Governance, Risk & Compliance offerings. Atos is investing heavily in developing real-time and prescriptive analytics tools, a must-have in the identity and financial fraud sector. They leverage numerous assets such the co-investment done with Siemens on their analytics platform, Atos Codex, as well as the new in memory server , Bullion, technology acquired from Bull., and the real-time payment fraud detection from Worldline. Similarly, Atos is adding software defined data centers into the options for its managed services offering, having moved more than six of its existing clients already. This new approach sees a shift in management emphasis away from the technology platforms toward the application workloads. This brings a number of benefits to its clients: faster application provisioning, automated business continuity, high availability, and the ability for applications to run across multiple platforms and clouds. Demonstrating successful client transition on to this type of policy based environment should help differentiate Atos managed services offering.

At HfS, we hear many case studies about how service providers are digitally transforming client operations and building new customer experiences. Atos shared case studies across transportation, consumer goods, financial services and manufacturing clients with us as well this week. Rather than approaching these opportunities like a digital design agency would with the technology and execution to perhaps follow, the Atos approach was very much rooted in and across client operations which felt appropriate for clients who were themselves not “born in the cloud.” This was a welcome reminder that solving for client needs and orchestrating the As-a-Service Economy, doesn’t require a mandatory in-house digital agency and that a deep operational understanding of a client is just as appropriate a starting point for transformation.