Point of View

Betting Big & Being Agile: Atos Brings Core Strengths to the “As-a-Service Economy”

Stuck in Parisian morning traffic last week on the way to the Atos analyst event it was hard not to admire the agility and self-confidence of the motorcyclists weaving between cars and trucks to get to their destination quicker than the rest. By the end of the event, we saw a parallel in the agility and willingness of Atos to bet big to get to where it wants to go.

 

As it seeks to create competitive space to move into and own, Atos is emerging as a service provider with one foot in the present and one in the near future. 

 

Over the course of two days, we heard strong examples of how Atos is embodying many ideals of the “As-a-Service Economy” specifically around: Business Cloud, Proactive Intelligence, Intelligent Data, Brokers of Capability and Intelligent Engagement.  This was all welcome news as the industry is facing a time of significant change. While we heard a bit less about Design Thinking, Intelligent Automation, and Writing off Legacy, the most encouraging outcome of the event was the realization that Atos has two core strengths which we believe will serve it very well as it moves into the As-a-Service Economy.

 

Those strengths, which every service provider is encouraged to embrace, are:

 

  1. An agile, open and adaptable culture.  Having grown significantly through acquisitions, Atos is the melting pot of IT service providers.   Out of this pot it has created an adaptable culture. We believe that its future lies in service integration and that opportunity demands it to be agile if it is to undertake the wholesale shift in go to market strategies and delivery models that the new market requires. Yet agile it is. For instance, on January 1 it realigned its go to market approach by creating a global account strategy targeting the top 260 accounts, abandoning a country focused model that now stood in the way of change. The new global account strategy is the right decision long-term even if it may create short-term distractions. We see many service providers struggle to make similar moves – even though they know it to be necessary.
  2. A willingness to bet big. Exemplified perhaps best by Atos’s massive and successful bid to run all the IT for the Olympics through 2024.  This big bet of a fixed price contract with unknown delivery locations together coupled with the transformative acquisitions of Bull and of Xerox ITO demonstrates a clear ability to put it all on the line. When faced with a shifts of the magnitude that the As-a-Service economy brings, only big bets will get one there.

 

Like our Parisian motorcyclists, Atos showed that it can move fast and is not afraid to change direction. For example, Canopy, its JV for the delivery of cloud services, started as a standalone business including its own consulting team but when that model reduced the benefits for Atos overall, they were quick to integrate Canopy more closely as a core asset for the entire enterprise.

 

The As-a-Service Economy moves fast and over the next year HfS would like to hear more about Atos’s progression against our 8 Ideals but that shouldn’t be a challenge for an agile service provider willing to make big bets.

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