Year in Review: Atos

Casting our minds back to November, Business Chief spoke with Atos, the global information technology and services company. Chief Technology Officer, Asia Pacific, Uli Braun, discussed with us the ways in which Atos is future-proofing clients.

Braun’s role, we found out, sees him lead a number of complementary departments in the Asia Pacific region. “As CTO, I’m the head of portfolio for Asia Pacific, the head of pre-sales for Asia Pacific and I’m also in charge of analyst relationships in the region. Basically, I take our global portfolio, apply it to the Asia-Pacific market and make it work in a local context.”

In Braun’s experience, some of the biggest difficulties clients were running into stem from legacy systems. “In this region it’s most likely the biggest challenge of all, because it prevents companies from becoming more agile and business-focused”, he said. “That legacy burden is very heavy, and it's very difficult to fix for companies that are 100, 150, 200 years old.”

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It’s not enough to simply change technology, however; the culture must change also. “It's not just a question of infrastructure,” said Braun. “It holds back the entire business transformation, because the case is made that ‘we have always been doing it this way, it has always worked, so why should we change to something else?’ That resistance to change can be quite significant, because most organisations are still very traditionally organised. You have a CIO, you have a CEO, you have a CFO. Quite often the CIO reports to the CFO. There's nobody who owns the digital agenda.”

Atos keeps itself on the forefront of technology in a rapidly changing world by investing in R&D, as Braun explained. ““There are two areas where most of the R&D spending goes. One is in cloud computing, and the other is in AI and machine learning technologies – that’s across the spectrum from hardware, such as IoT and edge devices, all the way to the software and application side.”

For the full interview with Braun and many more details on the work Atos does in digital transformation, take a look at the company’s exclusive brochure.