Shaping the new normal.

An overview of trends, scenarios and strategies as we move ahead.

We are at a tipping point for Atos. We have announced a vision and strategy for growth. Our vision of the present and the future and the trends we are seeing is a transition from data deluge to services. Data so far has been produced and accumulated, and will continue to do so, but not all has been used to extract intelligence to create usable outcome and services for the users.

This is what lies ahead of us and when we look at the services companies are calling for, three characteristics stand out:

value, experience, safety.

Firstly a service must deliver a usable outcome, something of value that could not be achieved in a traditional economy, but is possible in a data-driven economy. Also, a service is about the experience you have in using it, and this experience extends into employee experience as well as user experience, as we have seen in this period of global emergency. Finally safety, which has taken on a wider scope to encompass not just data and network security but also decarbonization.

These calls translate into 7 breakthroughs that are shaping the new normal:

• Full stack cloud. By this we mean the sum of a number of accelerating trends, such as a greater migration to the cloud accelerated by the covid situation and a tendency for the cloud to be more and more hybrid, integrating more public in the equation. Also, there is a tendency towards multicloud strategies, that take into account not just public and private, but also multiple public cloud providers, so as not to depend on a single supplier. The other trend is migrating to the cloud both the infrastructure, the platform and the applications.
• Business critical applications. Today only 10% of applications on the cloud are business critical, the majority being taken up by infrastructure and functional, management applications. Now is the time to migrate business critical apps to the cloud and current trend is that this figure will reach 30% in 4 years.
• Digital platforms. These are about sharing data between different companies, either belonging to the same value chain or not, and giving birth to new applications for the end customer. This will represent around 70% of the new value created in the next 5 years.
• Customer experience. This is not a new concept, but the focus now is about VR, AR and immersive experiences relying on sophisticated technologies that were not available until now.
• Employee experience. This is an aspect closely related to customer experience, and now more than ever, is about the new digital workplace. We will have to widen our scope to re-imagine collaboration and productivity.
• Digital security. Here we talk about cyber security, but also securing IoT and being independent of a single provider. Another important notion is the traceability of what we purchase, blockchain in this is key, as it moves beyond crypto currency and financial transactions to take on a new potential expanding in new sectors such as retail or manufacturing.
• Decarbonization. Recently in June, as part of the analyst day, we made several commitments to the market of what Decarbonization means to us. Decarbonization, not new to us being Atos already carbon neutral since 2018, is one of the pillars of the strategy of Atos which will contribute 1% to our growth. On one hand side, in fact, we want to keep reducing our emission aiming to be net zero by 2035 on the other side we want help our customer supporting them in finding the clear path to increase their efficiency in term of carbon reduction strategy. This is by far the most important trend we are looking at and similarly to the well-known SLAs our contracts will embark new binding agreements, what we call DLAs (Decarbonization level agreement).

To deliver on these seven breakthroughs, at Atos we have defined a strategy relying on our know-how and technologies based on four pillars:

• Spring – this is Atos’ strategy that call for verticalizing the company, revising our portfolio so that it focuses on six key industries

1. Manufacturing
2.  Finance and insurance
3.  Public sector and defence
4.  Telco media and technologies
5.  Resources and services
6.  Healthcare and life sciences

• People – to achieve our strategy we are changing company culture to attract the best digital talents offering them a chance to work on exciting projects regarding decarbonizations. We are also driving change through acquisitions, acquiring new skills and talent through new perspectives
• Alliances and partnerships. Atos has a decade-long culture of relying on partnerships, with hyperscalers, software providers and cloud service providers.
• Technologies – Atos spend € 250 million in R&D per year, the highest level in our industries, investing in medium, but also on long term technologies such as quantum computing. However, technological advance no longer happens in isolation, but in eco-systems, and that is why we invest in open innovation through our Atos Scaler initiative.

We are living in challenging times, but there are important opportunities ahead of us to help all of our customers continue to be successful in the new normal.