Last week, PAC spent a day in Atos’ headquarters in Bezons, France, to get an update on Atos’ Managed Services offerings, performance and strategy.

The Managed Services business line is by far the biggest service line within Atos. With the acquisition of Siemens IT Solutions and Services, Atos has clearly become one of the global leaders for Managed Services. After 18 months the time has come to have a look at what has happened since the merger.

Portfoliowise, Atos made a huge step forward by integrating new technologies and developing innovative offerings, especially around cloud and cloud enabling services.

In this context Canopy, the joint venture with EMC and VMware, is a clear lighthouse unit. Canopy takes advantage of Atos’ strong data center capabilities; moreover, in the SaaS environment Canopy provides a growing number of solutions (from Atos as well as from partners such as SAP or Siemens PLM) and offers an Enterprise Apps Store.

Besides Canopy there are further highlights from a portfolio perspective, such as the offerings that Atos created around Microsoft’s Office 365 (Atos A3C) and Secured Cloud (originally for the UK public sector). Moreover, Atos especially convinces us when it comes to the combination of different cloud approaches (hybrid cloud).

Regarding standardization and industrialization, Atos has worked very hard to take the best from the former Atos Origin respectively SIS and to create a new delivery structure and processes. Atos has been quite successful in this journey so far, resulting in good improvements of delivery costs. Nevertheless, there is still room for progress.

Last but not least, Atos has been able to win several nice, substantial deals this year, both in the historical core countries (France, Germany, UK) and other geographies (like McGraw Hill in the USA or PostNord in the Nordics). Atos takes advantage of a strong sales engagement team focusing on large deals, which acts really globally and supports the local business units with expertise and sales power. This team is a strong and powerful weapon helping Atos to succeed in the race for the really big deals. Clearly these deals have helped Atos to achieve a strong book-to-bill ratio.

In a nutshell, Atos has been boosted by the SIS integration. In terms of portfolio (in particular regarding innovation and cloud), delivery structure and finally sales, Atos is able to compete with the leaders on the MS market.

Authors:

Christophe Châlons, Group Chief Analyst

Klaus Holzhauser, Senior Vice President – IT Services Markets

Franck Nassah, Senior Vice President – Operations France