Atos OneCloud Initiative Launches With $2.4B Commitment

‘It’s all based on assets of Atos which have been built over the last quarters or years and sometimes decades,’ Atos CEO Elie Girard told CRN. ‘We’re gathering this internally under the same roof so that our customers can benefit seamlessly (from)…the 10 features, which all correspond to a very strong demand.’

French solution provider Atos is committing $2.4 billion to a new initiative aimed at proactively accelerating its customers’ migrations to the cloud through a one-stop shop incorporating 10 key Atos capabilities and personalized plans charting their journeys.

The rollout of Atos OneCloud comes as the global coronavirus pandemic has made cloud migrations more imperative for organizations and, in some cases, quite urgent, said Elie Girard, CEO of Atos, which is No. 25 on the CRN 2020 Solution Provider 500.

Atos OneCloud combines the Bezons, France-based company’s industry-specific customized consulting and application transformation expertise for end-to-end services supporting public, private and hybrid cloud environments, Girard said.

“It’s all based on assets of Atos which have been built over the last quarters or years and sometimes decades,” Girard told CRN. “We’re gathering this internally under the same roof so that our customers can benefit seamlessly [from]…the 10 features, which all correspond to a very strong demand. This is what our customers want at the moment, and we are the only one actually to be able to offer these this very comprehensive, one-stop shop.”

Atos OneCloud’s 10 offerings include industry-specific consultancy services, multi-cloud orchestration, standardized and automated management framework and architecture, a next-generation private and sovereign cloud platform, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, and cloud application development, modernization and replatforming.

Four of the Atos OneCloud offerings—bare metal solutions, cloud edge and far edge solutions, cybersecurity services and decarbonization of customers’ cloud infrastructure, data and applications—are “very big differentiators of Atos,” according to Girard.

“[They’re] probably the most cutting-edge and recent in the group, because they are the result of strong R&D for many of them,” he said.

Atos posted revenue of 11.59 billion euros or about $13.72 billion last year. It generates about 60 percent of its group revenue in Europe and the United Kingdom and close to 30 percent in the United States.

Atos will offer to codevelop with customers a personalized “Your Atos OneCloud Plan” in 90 days. The plans will include customized cloud business cases, industry-specific cloud reference architecture and a roadmap for applications, data and infrastructure modernization.

Atos’ 2 billion-euro OneCloud commitment, the equivalent of about $2.4 billion, will be spread over five years and cover increased cloud technical certification for its employees, research and development, hybrid cloud investments, and acquisitions. The company has acquired or entered into negotiations to acquire 11 companies in the last year.

Atos employs approximately 7,000 cloud experts, 30,000 application experts and 10,000 data center and network experts who currently have about 6,500 technical cloud certifications.

“We need to accelerate the certification,” Girard said, noting that certification is a key aspect of the journey-to-the-cloud era.

Atos OneCloud is being introduced with the backing of key Atos partners, which are slated to offer support by video at a launch event Monday, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google Cloud, Dell Technologies, IBM, Red Hat and SAP.

The foundation of Atos’ partnership with Google Cloud is helping enterprise customers digitally transform their businesses, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said in one of the videos. Atos was Google Cloud’s Global Breakthrough Partner of the Year in 2018 and the Services Partner of the Year for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2019.

“Over the past few years, our partnership has expanded as has our opportunity to serve common customers,” Kurian said in the video. “For instance, Atos launched Google Cloud innovation labs in Europe and the United States to help customers apply AI and machine learning capabilities to solve important business problems. Second, the addition of Maven Wave this year further strengthened Atos’ global leadership position with Google Cloud. Third, Atos continues to support key Google Cloud initiatives such as our bare metal solution for legacy workloads. They’ve also supported our Cloud Acceleration Program for SAP and our data center takeout modernization initiative, as well as our recent launch of Google Workspace.”

Atos’ OneCloud Offerings

Atos OneCloud offering will include industry-specific consulting services to develop cloud business solutions at scale.

“It’s an industry-by-industry, business-by-business adapted, tailored consultancy, which is also the result of the reorganization of the group in the ‘Spring’ program,” Girard said.

Under its Spring program, initiated this year, Atos set up its business as an industry-led organization, reorganizing its offerings and go-to-market approach around six industries: manufacturing, financial services and insurance, public sector and defense, resources and services, health care and life sciences, and telecom, media and technology.

Atos is providing multi-cloud orchestration across private and public clouds, including all major public cloud providers, to maximize customers’ application migration and portability, lower operational costs and ensure cloud interoperability.

“That’s a very important feature, because you see more and more large customers—large [corporations] in the U.S., in Europe, everywhere—requesting to have two or three public cloud providers,” Girard said. “We have a very special role here to play in the value chain.”

The third Atos OneCloud offering is highly standardized and automated management framework and architecture.

“This is a feature which I like particularly and which is not often put forward when we talk about the cloud,” Girard said. “It is a key component of the cloud migration to make sure that once you are in the cloud, the new setup is fully orchestrated automatically—meaning that automated and standardized orchestration layer.”

Atos also is providing its next-generation private and sovereign cloud to be deployed and managed in any datacenter to help ease customers’ migrations to the cloud while ensuring compliance requirements governing data sovereignty and security are met.

“We can guarantee the sovereignty, the localization, the security of the data,” Girard said. “That’s a feature which was already important before COVID, but obviously ... COVID has strengthened the sovereignty needs and the demands from many customers, not just the public-sector customers, but many large, private customers … in particular in Europe.”

Atos included cloud application development, modernization and replatforming, including DevSecOps, in its OneCloud initiative to help customers accelerate their time to market for business-critical applications.

“We have a very strong capability in cloud application replatforming since our acquisition of Syntel two years ago and Maven Wave a year ago, [as well as] the further acquisitions that we’re going to make,” Girard said.

Customers also will get access to AI and ML capabilities through Atos’ in-house intellectual property and its partnerships with the three major public cloud providers—AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The ‘Big Differentiators’

Atos’ bare metal solutions —which support non-virtualized, business-critical applications adjacent to the cloud and increase the breadth of customers’ consumable cloud services—are among the company’s differentiators boosting its OneCloud initiative, according to Girard.

“We not only integrate the clouds, any instance of cloud, but also we power them,” he said. “We fuel those clouds with some high-performance, high-processing and high-memory servers that we do manage ourselves, which is very particular. We do that also for public cloud instances. We do install those bare-metal solutions in servers just behind the data centers of Google Cloud, as an example.”

Atos also incorporated its cloud edge and far edge solutions—local/field servers combined with 5G connectivity solutions for secure local processing and optimized bandwidth consumption.

“As we speak, 80 percent of the data in the world is produced in the data centers, 20 percent outside,” Girard said. “In five years from now, in 2025, it will be the opposite: 80 percent of the data will be produced at the edge. So it’s very important to be able not only to integrate the cloud and the edge data, but also to produce or assemble edge servers which are able to process, not just store, the data at the edge. This is also what we do on top of integrating all these infrastructures.”

Cybersecurity supervision services, another important and longstanding specialty of Atos, according to Girard, also is delivered through Atos OneCloud.

“We’re No. 1 in cybersecurity in Europe, No. 3 in the world, according to Gartner,” Girard said. “And that’s, of course, a very key feature when we talk about cloud.”

Atos last month completed the acquisition of Reston, Va.-based cybersecurity company Paladion, an AI-driven managed detection and response (MDR) provider with more than 800 employees and cybersecurity experts.

“[This] brings the cloud security to the prescriptive level, meaning that we are, thanks to this acquisition, able to anticipate the threats before they actually materialize,” Girard said. “This is extremely important in a cloud environment.”

Atos’ final differentiating OneCloud feature is decarbonization offerings promising year-over-year carbon footprint reductions for customers’ cloud infrastructure, data and applications.

“We launched a business of decarbonization a year ago,” Girard said. “It’s about guaranteeing to our customers the reduction of the carbon footprint of their IT, but also their business processes.”