Atos debuts OneCloud initiative to help accelerate enterprise migrations to sustainable cloud setups

Atos is seeking to accelerate its clients’ cloud migration plans through the development of industry-specific consultancy and managed service support offerings, as part of its newly launched Atos OneCloud initiative.

The French IT services company is billing the offering as a “one-stop shop” for enterprises that want to ramp up their use of private, public and hybrid cloud resources, with the firm set to draw on its long-standing partnerships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM and others to deliver on its vision.

The company will essentially play the role of aggregator for its clients by offering them access to the cloud provider services of their choice, which will be packaged together with industry-specific consultancy services, and a commitment to help organisations decarbonise their operations by making use of Atos OneCloud.

The setup has a modular design to support enterprises that want to move their entire infrastructure estate to the cloud in one fell swoop, as well as those that want to take more of a piecemeal approach to things.

All of this will be set out in the personalised Atos OneCloud plan the company will co-create with its clients, which will see them work together to create industry-specific cloud reference architectures, and a roadmap setting out how their application and data migration plans will proceed, said Atos.

“This roadmap for enterprise transformation will be built and delivered end to end by Atos, with its powerful ecosystem of partners,” said Atos CEO Elie Girard. “We believe cloud is, more than ever, the new normal for digital and Atos is uniquely positioned to deliver the full value of cloud to its clients.”

The company has also set out plans to invest €2bn over the next five years in building out its own cloud stack and capabilities through acquisitions and by stepping up its research and development (R&D) activities.

Tom Reuner, senior vice-president at IT market watcher HFS, said the approach Atos is taking to assisting enterprises with their move to the cloud taps into a number of key industry trends, including the increased focus of enterprises on sustainability.

“We are seeing a secular shift in the industry as organisations are strongly accelerating the journey towards AI-enabled cloud capabilities that help to transform service delivery,” he said.

“As the pandemic is sadly showing that the goal has to be end-to-end delivery that is underpinned by expansive digital assets, Atos is reacting to this shift by bundling all of its cloud assets in a newly formed business unit to create a one-stop shop for its clients.”

Reuner also called out the “decarbonisation” aim of Atos OneCloud as being an important point of competitive differentiation for the firm.

To this point, Atos claims OneCloud’s offerings will “guarantee” year-on-year reductions in the size of its participants’ cloud infrastructure, data and applications-related carbon footprints, achieved through the supplementary support of the company’s Decarbonization Center of Excellence.

The company is also introducing “decarbonisation level agreements” (DLAs) to compensate users should their year-on-year carbon reduction commitments not be met.

During an online press conference announcing the launch of Atos OneCloud, Girard said carbon reduction is now a top of mind concern for all enterprises as they think about modernising their IT infrastructures and applications.

“More than ever before, organisations are faced with major challenges and must develop increasingly virtual customer interactions, maintain strong links between virtual teams, understand technology evolution, answer technology independence imperatives, and shrink their carbon footprint,” he said.

“And when we survey our customers, [they say they] want more flexibility, agility, reduced time to market and reliability, especially under business-critical applications. They want all these while improving the competitiveness, including on their cost, and they want safety (meaning security) technology independence, sovereignty, but also now, definitely decarbonisation because they all have strong carbon footprint reduction targets, and they just need concrete help to achieve them.”