Putting Innovation at the Heart of our Strategy
In 2010, post crisis, our clients face fundamental and permanent changes to the way they do business. And as the economy starts to recover, it is our responsibility to think one step ahead.
This is particularly important for technology companies like Atos Origin, as our business is to help companies perform and compete in a an ever changing business environments.
Last year, we took several initiatives in order to strengthen our innovation approach. We created a Scientific Community of our best 60 scientists and this community aims to identify the main technology evolutions in the IT area for the coming 20 years. We have also reorganized our strategic innovation capacity with the creation of our Group Innovation, Business Development and Strategy (GIBS) unit.
So what kind of changes will we see post crisis? I anticipate 4 great major changes:
- Financial: Money and capital will be more difficult to secure. The pressure on capital and difficulties in borrowing will lead companies to carefully select how they should invest. Companies will no longer buy services when they can be rented, or be pay per use.
- Economic: The economic power will shift to the emerging economies in Asia. In this context, the pressure on costs will intensify, and in particular in European countries, where enterprises will have to protect and grow their margins, as global competition increases.
- Technology: Technologies offering new opportunities will mature and more and more Cloud computing solutions will appear on the market. Smart devices/smart phones are currently booming and Information Management and analytical solutions will also become widespread.
- Social: We will have to interact with multiple communities which are not necessarily based on geographical, or national identities, but on interests, cultures, traditions , values etc. We are entering the era of hyper-connectivity and in our private and/or professional lives, virtual communities will continue to grow and become a major channel to generate value.
A New Era of Information Technology is Beginning
In parallel, we are entering a new era of information technology. The first era was focused on management processes, administration, transactions, daily operations with clients. These services are now established and a must and necessity for our clients, whose main goal is efficiency. Now their costs must decrease and we must deliver more industrialized solutions.
We are now moving towards new domains aimed at controlling information overload, offering ubiquity and hyper-connectivity to enable new services and increasing the effectiveness of collaboration between clients, partners, suppliers. Furthermore there is strong corporate pressure to industrialise information management.
Innovation at the Heart of a New Growth Model
We aim to support our clients in moving to, and benefitting from, this new era and we are convinced that the solutions which we are working on are completely in line with the market’s needs and expectations. Cloud computing and Green IT were launched in January and the others will be presented each quarter in 2010:
- Cloud computing: a promising solution giving access to service on demand on a wide scale
- Green IT: a solution to sustainable development
- Smart Utilities: a key element in energy management
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and collaborative tools: a solution to the challenge of managing information as a whole
- Context aware computing: for mobile applications which integrate environment data and which provide the true added value of IT in the area of smart devices
- Social computing: for solutions to the challenge of the development of social networks inside and outside the enterprise
Creating and Sustaining Successful Innovation for Success Today
Our action plan in order to improve our operational performance is well underway and we are focussed on providing innovative offerings that will differentiate us from competition in the areas of high tech transactional services (HTTS), where Atos Worldline has leadership in Europe, and also cloud computing and Green IT.
Finally in 2009, we won several awards for different research programmes, such as servers virtualization techniques which are directly related to Cloud and Green IT, as well as a Sustainability Star for our work on the Vancouver Olympic Games.