Summary Bullets:
• The Atos event theme was described as an evolution “From Vision to Business Outcomes”; the integrator uses digital technology, including IoT, to help customers improve bottom lines, enhance products, and streamline operations.
• A growing number of Atos engagements are enabled by IoT platforms and services, including its own products and those of strategic partners. The event showcased offerings and examples of IoT-enabled outcomes.
Atos is a digital services provider and integrator, headquartered in France, with approximately 13 billion euros in annual revenues. The company has expertise in big data and security, high performance computing, business and platform solutions, digital payments, infrastructure and data management, and unified communications. While IoT is not a separate corporate business area, it has clearly become an enabler of digital transformation for a growing number of Atos’ business customers. IoT offerings and deployment examples were highlighted frequently in the company’s annual analyst event held in Boston on April 5th and 6th.
In a discussion entitled IoT: From Experimentation to Business Scale, Atos laid out the three primary solutions in its portfolio which feature IoT.
Atos Codex is a set of services around IoT including consulting, managed services (including device lifecycle management, remote monitoring, and security), back/office integration, application development, and “cloudification” platforms. The platforms have enabled Atos to develop custom vertical solutions in payments, automotive, smart home, healthcare, smart city and manufacturing. Atos focuses on industrialized use cases that allow customers to go beyond the primary phase of pilots and connectivity/data collection to large-scale deployments that provide process transformation and allow businesses to generate revenues from new services. Customer examples include: Renault’s connected car service; an unnamed global truck manufacturer for whom Atos provides fleet management, logistics and design optimization; and a “pay as you drive” scheme for a global insurance company. Throughout the examples Atos provided outcome statistics. For example, the trucking company was able to realize a 13% reduction in fuel costs and the insurer realized a 24% reduction in accident-related pay-outs.
Looking outside the company, Siemens has been a partner of Atos since 2011, and their alliance focuses on jointly offering digital, innovative solutions. The Siemens Mindsphere platform along with Atos Codex services yields an impressive go-to-market partnership for industrial IoT. Mindsphere adds data analytics and digital twin capabilities that include VR-enhanced simulations for trouble-shooting and predictive maintenance about when/where a problem may occur. It can also be used for performance optimization throughout each step of the manufacturing design and build phases. Mindsphere manages over 1 million devices today in the field and supports both edge and cloud computing and analytics models. The Siemens partnership also helps Atos with its ability to provide solutions both for OT and IT, increasingly important for IoT deployments.
Atos is also a 70% shareholder in Worldline, a company best known for its work in e-payments and transactions with three business lines: financial services (e-payments for banks); merchant services (payment services for retailers); and mobility and e-transactions where it is involved in connected vehicles, home automation and other b2b2c offerings, and industrial IoT. The connectivity platform that is part of Atos Codex was developed by Worldline and currently connects about 350,000 industrial devices from medical equipment to traffic lights and wind turbines, providing troubleshooting, remote monitoring, software updates and file transfers.
Aside from these three primary business groups that offer IoT solutions, Atos is involved in a number of other areas that touch on IoT. For example it provides blockchain consulting and deployment services which increasingly dovetail with IoT deployments for manufacturing supply chains. While Atos is involved in many other areas of digital transformation, its work in IoT and related areas such as analytics, digital twin, and blockchain, along with strategic alliances with companies such as Siemens and Dell, provide it with some unique differentiators compared to other global IT service providers and systems integrators that are tackling similar innovative technologies and projects.
While IoT services remain a highly competitive market, Atos is approaching the market by using its own IP, coupled with strong partnerships, to help evolve IoT projects into meaningful, scalable, projects with significant business outcomes and high ROI. The company not only has a strong set of solutions for the Industrial IoT but has diversified with B2B2C solutions for healthcare, automotive telematics, retail, and home automation which provide the business with an understanding of their end-customers, including data on user behavior that can provide important feedback for product and service development.
IT Connection 