(By Anthony Miller – Friday, 24th April 2009 9:15am). I caught up again with Atos Origin UK CEO, Keith Wilman just now to get a bit more ‘colour and movement’ on his rather good results last week (see Another storming quarter for Atos Origin UK). The story on Consulting is interesting because there are indeed new projects being kicked off even now in a couple of areas: business analytics and ‘lean’ (or ‘time and motion’ as we oldies used to call it!). In other words, it’s all about cutting costs.
Outside of Consulting, the day after reporting its results, Atos announced another win for its online ticketing system with UK bus operator, Go-Ahead. This is one of Atos ‘sweet spots’, with National Express already using their system, though trainline.com, developed by Capgemini, still rules that market. We’re also expecting to hear confirmation next week of the ill-kept secret that Atos is part of the IBM consortium that won the bid to develop a new National Biometric Information Service for the UK Border Agency (see UK Government to spend £1.65bn on ID & passport contracts).
On the offshore front, regular readers will know I give Atos a hard time on its relatively ‘relaxed’ approach to global delivery. The UK is a somewhat different story for Atos, with about 40% of its private sector SI workforce offshore. Still room for improvement, of course, and with its infrastructure management services too, with about 10-15% of the workforce offshore. But it’s Atos’ European business I really worry about, as it appears management are just not prepared to bite the bullet on onshore staffing. I just think the longer they wait to take the ‘tough’ decisions, the weaker position they will be in when market demand recovers. Now’s the time to take the pain else there’ll be little chance to see the gain!
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