HFS Highlight: Atos OneCloud announcement is putting culture, people, and processes at the heart of the journey toward Cloud Native

The market dynamics around the adoption of cloud services continue to change rapidly. Organizations scramble to accelerate their journey toward Cloud Native. As the circumstances of Covid-19 demonstrate, cloud is not just about lowering cost, VPNs, and the need to work from anywhere, but also the ability to deliver end-to-end and to transform the enterprise through innovation. Service providers are reacting to these shifting demand patterns by reorganizing both their organizational structures as well as their go-to-market initiatives.  

First, we saw Infosys realigning its cloud assets under the Cobalt umbrella followed by Accenture and IBM creating new organizations. The announcement launch of the Atos OneCloud sits somewhere in-between those approaches as it combines a set of 10 expansive offerings in a one-stop–shop proposition. HFS sat down with Wim Loos, Head of Cloud Enterprise Solutions at Atos to discuss the details of the announcement. 

The cornerstone of Atos OneCloud is the blend of industry-specific consulting capabilities with cloud technical experience 

What sets the Atos OneCloud solution announcement apart from the ones of its peers is that it proposes specific go-to-market initiatives. The “OneCloud Plan” aims to co-create solutions with clients in a consultative approach within 90 days that is geared toward fast results with emphasis on tangible steps that can provide quick wins. Simply put,  the goal is to land and expand. As Wim emphasized,  the go-to-market is blending industry-specific consulting capabilities with a deep technical cloud experience. Thus, the announcement is dovetailing Atos’ organizational restructuring dubbed SPRING. With that  Atos is moving from a largely horizontal go-to-market to one that is focused on verticals. Cloud will be the first practice for this new organizational setup. As Elie Girard, Atos CEO puts it OneCloud is both a strategy for his organization and a pragmatic methodology for engagements with clients. 

In terms of capabilities, Atos OneCloud encapsulates the expected offerings such as multi-cloud orchestration, standardized and automated management frameworks, and architectures as well as cloud application development, modernization, and re–platforming. A crucial point as Wim pointed out is that these offerings are modular and should be seen as fast enablers. Differentiation kicks in with the IP developed for the European GAIA-X which aims to develop common requirements for a European data infrastructure. Furthermore, decarbonization offerings guaranteeing year-on-year carbon footprint reduction of cloud infrastructure, data, and applications. 

A €2 billion investment program is aimed at transforming the culture attuned to Cloud Native 

The ambitious €2 billion investment program that is planned to run over 5 years, is focused predominantly on culture and people. (Just to contrast, Accenture had announced a $ 3 billion investment program as part of its CloudFirst initiative.)  

Atos is focused on a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, the company aims to transform its workforce with structured qualification and certification programs. On the other hand, it is expanding its IGNITE global graduate program that is meant to build a global cloud-native workforce. In addition, Atos is planning to use those investments for research and development in areas such as private cloud, bare metal solutions, and edge. And lastly, it plans to make acquisitions that could help to accelerate the transformation toward Cloud Native. 

The Bottom-line: Atos OneCloud is a change agent for Atos internally as much as it is a realignment of its go-to-market 

Atos is recognizing that the journey toward Cloud Native is more about culture, people, and processes than about technical capabilities. Thus, the OneCloud announcement should be seen as much as an internal change agent as it is a crystallization of its portfolio and a recalibration of its go-to-market. This key question is how quickly the intended transformation can be achieved. As Hyperscalers are starting to win big contracts that were previously competed by service providers, the pressure points become ever more evident.