The Cloud Offering from Atos When Atos Origin and Siemens IT Solutions and Services officially merged into Atos in July 2011 they combined their cloud offerings Atos Sphere and Trusted Cloud. The new approach is focused on helping customers find their individual way to the cloud. Driven by the customersʼ business needs Atos wants to provide performant, flexible and scalable services that do not add to the complexity of the customersʼ IT landscapes. Jordan Janeczko, Global Cloud Strategist for the Systems Integration Division at Atos International and Raoul Fleming, Cloud Business Development and Strategy, talk with PAC fellow Christoph Witte about the new Atos approach and why it is not that important which cloud flavor the customers go for.
PAC Fellow Christoph Witte talks to... How has your cloud strategy evolved since Siemens IT Solutions and Services and Atos Origin combined their forces in Atos? Jordan Janeczko: Our cloud offerings are more complete today. SIS and Atos Origin have brought in their respective parts. Although both were active in the consulting and service area of the cloud equation, they focused differently. Where SIS pronounced cloud consulting, cloud services for vertical industries, integration services and security, Jordan Janeczko is the global cloud strategist for the systems integration division at Atos International. He has been involved in innovation and new product generation since 1999, both in the IT and telecommunications industries. Since 2009 Jordan has been helping define and build secure cloud services and cloud integration services, and has been invited as a cloud thought leader to speak at many global cloud events. Atos Origin brought horizontal services like the virtual desktops from the Atos Sphere offering as well as consulting and a deep outsourcing expertise to the table. Atos Origin concentrated on flexibility. So we brought together our multiple strengths. Our combined cloud approach reflects the best of both and is more than ever focused on guiding customers to make the right decision while at the same time growing our stack of offerings. What customers can take as a given today are the following principles: we always recommend the way to more efficient and flexible services that suits our customers best, regardless whether it leads to a certain flavor of cloud or to no cloud at all. We help build an appropriate cloud strategy for our customers, act on it and implement an integrated hybrid enterprise IT environment. Hybrid means it can reside partly on the customerʼs premises, in our data centers and/or in the public cloud.... Jordan Janeczko, Global Cloud Strategist for the Systems Integration Division at Atos International As business technologists we are vendor-agnostic. The relevant players like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP or VMware are our partners. What does Atos offer to customers what other service providers donʼt? Jordan Janeczko: We consider ourselves as business technologists, so we offer vendoragnostic advice, integration services and cloud services. We help our customers to find their individual way to the cloud whether it is public, private, hybrid or even no cloud at all. Our first concern is business, our second is technology. So we are not coaxing our customers into a certain technology, we are guiding them to make those technology decisions which support their business and their customers best. Besides that we have a proven track record of implemented cloud services in different vertical markets. Such as Assignio in Germany, a cloud-based healthcare ecosystem as well as a public sector cloud. Can you give us some examples of the cloud projects Atos is involved in? Jordan Janeczko: One example would be from the German public sector, the project "goberlin": In Berlin, Atos helps to build the first Government Cloud in Germany. The City of Berlin, Atos and several other partners are starting to build a cloud-based market place where egovernment services and private services will be combined. 2
The first case of implementation will be on the "relocation" subject. All services regarding this topic will be offered through this market place. Goal of the project is to meet, solve and implement the specific security requirements of the public sector in Germany as well as to provide a privatecloud-based solution beyond the borders of Berlin. Another example from another industry is Rapid Aid. With this partly cloud-based solution customers can automatically distribute centrally managed software and content into various regions worldwide. This is possible for instance for application updates for smartphones or tablet computers, but also for firmware updates in medical equipment like CT scanners or centrally edited scripts for call center agents. The solution utilizes Microsoftʼs cloud platform Azure as a transfer node for the updated software and content. The update itself, its management and eventually its billing is done on site on the customerʼs premises. Raoul Fleming: Yet another example for our cloud service offerings, one that can be used horizontally across different industries, is our Smart Communication and Collaboration project, a joint development with Microsoft, to provide services similar to Microsoft Office 365 in a secure cloud infrastructure which is hosted in a known Atos data center. This way our customers are always compliant with local security, privacy laws and regulations, while enjoying the benefits of flexible delivery and pricing agility. And last but not least Iʼd like to tell you about the web application we do for next yearʼs Olympic Games in London. With the spectator journey planner every ticket holder can compare and plan routes and means of transport to the venues of the Olympic Games. Which route is the fastest, which way of transportation offers the most comfort or the lowest price? How to go best by bicycle, train, car or by foot? In case the spectators choose public transport they are linked to the respective travel booking sites. This application is available today, but the nearer the games come, the more traffic and transactions are to be handled. So there is a strong need for flexibility and scalability. Thatʼs why we host this service in a private cloud out of our data centers in the Netherlands.... and Raoul Fleming, Cloud Business Development and Strategy, Atos Raoul Fleming, cloud business development and strategy, is responsible for the positioning and global alignment of Atosʼ cloud offering. He is also involved in marketing and pre-sales activities to develop future cloud services. Of course we have many more examples of cloud projects. They span different industries like retail, financial services, the public sector, healthcare, transport, energy or telecom and media. And we do both, industryand customer-specific solutions or cross-industry general services like the Smart Communication and Collaboration project or our Test- and Development as a Service. With its High-Tech Transactional Services (HTTS), Atos offers the financial industry and the energy sector quite a unique cloud-like service. How do the HTTS Services develop and what is their role within your overall cloud strategy? Raoul Fleming: HTTS is one of the examples that prove our ability to deliver verticalized ondemand solutions. We see HTTS as a key component and growth area for our overall cloud strategy for all vertical markets. Existing systems are evolving to a full SaaS model to allow us to provide a unique, rich and highly efficient set of BpaaS services. Atos Origin and SIS were both considered as classic outsourcers. Why should customers choose you as their cloud provider? 3
Jordan Janeczko: We do not only have a strong reputation in outsourcing but also in consulting and systems integration. And every part of it underlines how the new Atos evolves into a trusted cloud provider. We have deep industry know-how, are very skilled and effective in planning, developing and running applications. As an outsourcer we always had to run our infrastructure with absolute efficiency in order to be attractively priced without impacting our bottom-line. So we had been users ourselves of virtualized infrastructures and loosely coupled services long before it was called cloud computing. We see cloud computing as a kind of evolution which started with traditional outsourcing, moved on to shared services and now evolves into cloud services. These can be hosted onpremise, in hosted private clouds, in public clouds or in hybrid landscapes. The customers choose and with our different crossindustry offerings, of which cloud computing is one important part, we help them achieve it. The examples you gave us are all based on private clouds or reside in hybrid environments. Donʼt you consider public clouds as enterprise-ready? Jordan Janeczko: No. I donʼt want to generalize that. It depends on the customersʼ needs. When they for instance need a map service to show their global location or provide a dynamic routing service and no personal or classified data is involved, the customer can easily order a service from the public cloud. But the more critical a service gets for a company the less suited it is for a public cloud. And if a customer wants a public cloud service that fits into their portfolio we integrate it. Raoul Fleming: The ability to mix and match different services from different sources into a reliable yet flexible IT landscape is one of Atosʼ strong assets. We will be led by the customerʼs business requirements, security and regulatory environment to propose the most appropriate cloud deployment model, rather than being one-size-fits-all. But for enterprise-critical services you prefer private and not public clouds? Jordan Janeczko: Yes, at this point we do. When public clouds will be more reliable and secure in a couple of years we may change this policy but until itʼs proven knowledge we wonʼt. When it comes to private clouds, we as a service provider recommend hosted private clouds. This is good for the customer, because it frees them from big capital investment and gives them more flexibility, scalability and lower costs. It is also a good thing for us, because we can leverage our infrastructure investments and reap the fruits of standardization and automation, which in turn give our customers a less complex environment to deal with. In the hosted private cloud environment it is the provider who works in a cloud structure. The customer gets the benefit from that, without taking any risks. He still has a very secure service deal with individual SLAs, a fixed cost structure and life cycle management with built-in innovation. The gains come from more flexibility, scalability and lower cost in certain areas. Atos uses the term cloud sourcing quite regularly. What do you mean by that? Jordan Janeczko: Basically the term describes a combination of cloud computing and outsourcing. Customers buy services, not necessarily from a public cloud, but the flexibility of the purchase and the delivery model is very similar to the public cloud model. We provide them with a secure and compliant environment, guaranteed availability and performance. This cloud sourcing approach reduces the complexity for the customer. From the customer perspective: the service provider is better placed to address any short-comings of the cloud business models while allowing the customer to reap the benefits from it. Raoul Fleming: Our main aim over time is to provide a comprehensive stack of standardized building blocks that can be sourced as a Service. This allows us to give the customer very attractive pricing models as well as the possibility to construct the right solution for their business needs. n 4
Analyst View Current developments in almost all established IT market segments be it technology or services have been strongly characterized by the cloudification of delivery architectures, offering portfolios and payment models. And also the new Atos continues to build on the strategy that SIS and Atos Origin had been following prior to their merger however, with combined forces now. Today, Atos can even more credibly position itself with services offerings along the entire cloud value chain ; from consulting to systems integration, managed services and operations to own, platform-based solution offerings. Karsten Leclerque Principal Consultant +49 89 23 23 68 27 k.leclerque@pac-online.com And this is exactly what customers expect from their IT services partner. Recently conducted PAC surveys have shown that there is still widespread reluctance towards the cloud topic on the user side, even if IT decision makers are well aware of the various potential advantages and are obviously keen on exploiting these benefits. Uncertainty has been among the main reasons for this restraint uncertainty regarding security, performance and data privacy issues, but also in view of the great diversity of concepts, technologies and offerings that are meanwhile subsumed under the cloud brand. Companies are not looking to invest in the cloud for its own sake. It is cloud-related aspects like flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness that IT managers are searching for in order to support the business in the most efficient way. As one of the few technology-independent IT services providers with international reach, Atos has acknowledged experience in technology integration and operation as well as deep industry know-how in various sectors. Atos is thus well positioned to support customers on their transformational journeys, when it comes to choosing the technology and operations approach that fits best be it the integration of public cloud solutions, an outsourced private cloud model, a pure on-premise solution, or a combination of all these things. As a European company with multi-national presence and data center resources, Atos can provide customer proximity and offer services and solutions according to local law and data privacy regulation an aspect of particular importance when it comes to external cloud services. And with its existing Hi-Tech Transactional Services (HTTS), Atos owns a unique asset that stands for longstanding experience in providing platform-based, industry-specific solutions and services, based on flexible payment. PAC is convinced that there is a promising future potential for such cloud-like models and that this potential is yet far from being exploited. 5
About Atos Atos is an international information technology services company with annual revenues of EUR 8.7 billion and 78,500 employees in 42 countries. Serving a global client base, it delivers hi-tech transactional services, consulting, systems integration and managed services. Atos is focused on business technology that powers progress and helps organizations to create their firm of the future. It is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic Games and is quoted on the Paris Eurolist Market. Atos operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting, Atos Worldline and Atos WorldGrid. For more information, please visit www.atos.net. About Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) From strategy to execution, PAC delivers focused and objective responses to the growth challenges of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) players. Founded in 1976, PAC is a privately held research & consulting firm for the software and ICT services market. PAC helps ICT vendors to optimize their strategies by providing quantitative and qualitative market analysis as well as operational and strategic consulting. We advise CIOs and financial investors in evaluating ICT vendors and solutions and support their investment decisions. Public institutions and organizations also rely on our key analyses to develop and shape their ICT policies. For more information, please visit www.pac-online.com. 6