 "Atos '2019 Ambition' plan has India at its core")
The euro 12 billion IT services, consulting and transactional services provider, Atos is making India as its core delivery centre as it rolls out its three-year growth strategic plan ‘2019 Ambition’.
As part of the plan the France-headquartered firm is looking at an organic revenue growth of 2-3%, operating margin rate at 10.5-11% and closing gap with its peers (MNCs and Indian IT services players) in the consulting and systems integration services.
“We are saying that while India will lead in delivery of our traditional services like ADM and SI, it will also be the hub of our digital transformation business. So India for us will be centre of expertise as well as centre of delivery. We always had some of these centres, but now we have consolidated these further in India, we are also consolidation leadership in India,” said Ursula Morgenstern, Global Head of Consulting & Systems Integration Atos.
Atos has christened its clients' digital transformation under the group called Digital Transformation Factory, which has four main pillars—Canopy based its Hybrid cloud, SAP Hana, digital workplace and Codex.
“We are creating CoE for each of these platforms with required expertise here in India. These CoEs will be in addition to the growth and leadership role in ADM from India. We had parts of these centres already in India so under cloud CoE we have 300 consultants in India, we also have the SAP HANA CoE, which will be further scaling it,” said R V Narasimham, head of global delivery centres India & Poland, for global consulting and systems integration. Atos has over 12,000 SAP professionals in over 40 countries, SAP HANA by Atos revenue is expected to grow from current €100 million in 2016, to € 700 million in 2019.
What this also means is that the real ownership of the growth factories, product, the IP, and development is being moved to India. “As I mentioned India is centre of expertise for us, it will provide the thought leadership. For instance, Canopy is our largest cloud offering, but our cloud products have been developed from India. Atos is in a unique position as clients preference of work is changing. For instance, if we look at what is happening in the industry, in certain contracts clients want these projects closer to them, how do we then use our European workforce to deliver those services. We also see that traditional lines like infrastructure services and SI and end consulting are all blurring,” added Morgenstern.
The other big initiative that the company has undertaken is to set up the Atos Global University in India. The plans for University is still in the initial stages but a soft launch has already been done by the launch of CoEs and transition of knowledge from all its global centres.
“When it comes to digital transformation, I think we are in a unique position. For clients when it comes to digital they want these to be driven closer to them. We have 15,000 people in Western Europe. Also what digital is doing is bringing the business and technical teams together. This is also impacting the way we are hiring people. It is easy to teach digital but you need people who can communicate and then it will be better if we hire from a wider variety of people,” she added.
One of the aim of ‘2019 Ambition’ is to close the gap between Atos’ consulting and SI practice when compared to its peers, which include Indian IT players as well. Morgenstern said that though in the traditional IT services the company may have to play a catch-up game, the story in the digital is different.
“I think the next three years are going to be interesting as each of us are getting disrupted and everyone will react in a different way. We are seen as visionary in the IoT segment by several analyst firms. What plays in our favour, at this point of time, clients need agile close to them. That’s an advantage we have for customers in Europe. The other one is IP. Moreover the IT market has become more blurred. Manufacturers are entering, we are competing with Amazon, Google, telco companies, and each of us are figuring out how we will come out of this,” said Morgenstern.
The other big initiative that the company is planning to undertakedo is set up a development centre for sports engagement out of India. Atos has been managing global sport event and is the IT partner of Olympic and Paralympic games. “We are looking into this. The recently concluded Rio Games used our cloud platform and we are looking at leveraging our India hub for cloud and mobile solutions,” added Morgenstern.
