The IT landscape has drastically changed in the past few years. With the advent of next gen technologies such as cloud, Internet of Everything, mobile, social collaboration, big data & analytics, consumerization of IT etc the business environments have completely transformed. With rise of these technologies, the enterprises are looking to leverage them for their transformation into real time efficient enterprises. These technologies ensue opportunities in terms of enabling communication and collaboration at a whole new level. However, it also presents a great challenge as enterprises must extend/ transform their legacy systems and adopt radically new approaches and strategies to work. This in addition brings in challenges of information security. "These are both exciting yet frightening times to be an enterprise CIO. When harnessed the right way, their enterprise can gain a competitive advantage in the market. yet, the transformation is not a cakewalk," explains Milind Kamat, EVP, CEO, Atos India. Helping several companies across the globe take advantage of these next gen technologies is Atos, a provider of consulting & systems integration, managed operations, and transactional services. The global IT services giant has always been focused on working with next gen business technologies that help powering progress and help enterprises create their firm of the future. Founded in 1988, the forward looking company has today built an impressive roster of global clients that reads the who's who of industry verticals such as Manufacturing, Retail & Transportation; Public Sector & Health; Financial Services; Telcos; Media & Utilities.

The company has always been able to stay a step ahead of the technology curve by identifying the next big technologies. This time around too the company has placed its bets on the technology trends that are stirring up a storm.

Internet: The Mover And Shaker

"The true game changer for IT has been the Internet," says Milind. And rightly so, the Internet is expected to reach the interior most part of India by 2020. More and more people and devices are connecting to the web today and this has aided in the development of these cutting edge technologies. The implementation of IPV6 is also playing a crucial role by enabling communication that will be particularly useful in the Internet of things arena, as millions of new devices will take advantage of Internet connectivity. There will be more and more data generated via Social media, cloud computing, Location Services, and Mobility. Infact, it is expected that by the year 2020 most things will, in some way, be connected to the Internet. The possibilities that arise from having such an interconnected world are very exciting and will open the door for transforming the way businesses function.

It is evident that companies that leverage this transformation will hugely benefit. This puts the spotlight on adopting next-gen technologies trends such as cloud / Social / analytics, Mobility that will be the next major and biggest IT computing cycle of the next 5 years. However, not every business is equipped with the resources or the technology to make this shift and require the support of subject matter experts. Moreover, this power comes when these technology trends come together, converge and bring a huge transformation. Identifying the power of these trends across industry verticals, Atos has developed a SOCLOMO ( social, cloud, location, mobile) strategy along with big data and analytics that aims at providing a converged platform to enable enterprises function effectively. Armed with this information, the company will help enterprises make sense of the abundant data generated in the ecosystem.

CLOUD: Turning the Risk to Opportunity

The first piece of the SOCLOMO puzzle is the cloud technology. Gartner says, cloud technology is when massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to an external customer. With the proliferation of better Internet bandwidth and improvements in web technology, it is disrupting the way companies look at IT. On one hand, the technology provides advantages such as cost efficiency, energy efficiency, disaster recovery, flexibility; however, it can also spell disaster when not implemented well. Not only does it raise security concerns but it also requires a great amount of automation between storage, network and performance. All these aspects are usually handled by various solutions that have been added on over time as needs increase which can lead to several challenges. As a solution to these issues, Atos has been working on building "Cloud Orchestration and Messaging Platform" which can connect all social, cloud, location and mobile seamlessly to orchestrate the business processes and allow cloud portability by mirroring workloads across clouds, so that if one cloud fails the other cloud takes over the business process.

The Atos "Cloud Orchestration and Messaging Platform" helps enterprises achieve seamless integration of business processes spanning multiple applications, clouds, social media and smart devices. "Such integrated messaging is not only a 'nice to have' requirement, but a 'must have' prerequisite for effective and efficient future business process management, not limited to an Enterprise Service Business but also addressing Extended Enterprises issues," says Milind. Nasscom last year awarded Atos India for this best process innovation award.

Atos delivers a full-spectrum cloud strategy – from modeling and realization to orchestrated performance of entire Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service layers. To provide these end to end cloud computing solutions, Canopy, the Atos cloud has partnered with two of the biggest leaders in IT—EMC and VMware. Built upon a tight ecosystem of best-of-breed technology, the Canopy cloud solutions are focused on bringing the benefits of Next Generation IT and cloud delivery to large organizations. The solution was built keeping in mind the security concerns and is thus based on pre-built environments on the strongest technology foundation. Using industry leading automation tools, Canopy allows enterprise companies to achieve their business goals and service levels in a multi-tenant or a dedicated single-tenant environment.

Mobility: Helping Enterprises Stay Connected

An average enterprise employee today owns at least one mobile smart device that he uses to access critical data on the go. Similarly, an end customer also owns mobile devices that he uses to connect to the web to access information at any given time. This tsunami of personal mobile devices coupled consumerization of IT has given a great push to mobility as a technology. Mobility means information, convenience, and social all served up on the go, across a variety of screen sizes and devices. This technology is a great way for businesses to stay connected to employees and customers alike. Having identified mobility as an integral part of the IT puzzle, Atos is bringing Mobility to the next level with Canopy Cloud. The Canopy Mobility Platform is based on the award-winning SAP Mobility Platform, which provides the means for delivering mobility functionality in SAP and Non- SAP environments. In addition, Enterprises already having an MEAP, Atos provides industry specific solutions to fasten up the implementation.

"It is critical for every business to first understand mobility as a behaviour and lifestyle before jumping on the mobility bandwagon," explains Milind. By understanding enterprise business goals and future IT equirements one should work towards building a mobility strategy. Atos helps organizations plan and build their mobile strategy from the ground up. The company works to enhance customer IT solutions with specific mobility functions in specific industries and onsequently filling existing gaps for its various customers. Atos' Cloud platform also addresses the underlying solution elements to connect, control, create and allow users to consume mobile applications.

The company understands that the strategies for internal and external communication are different and has hence taken two different approaches to mobility, enterprise mobility and contextual mobility.

Atos' enterprise mobility solution is aimed at running clients' businesses better, faster and cheaper. It is a unique product that allows companies to unlock the full potential of mobility in the enterprise by providing a simple,fast and controlled approach for implementing mobile solutions. It enables users to quickly develop and deploy mobile applications, captures customer intelligence from mobile applications and helps support BYOD in the workplace. Providing benefits such as improve employee productivity, reduce process costs and extend marketing strategies to mobile devices, Atos' enterprise mobility solution is generating waves in the industry.

One of the quick win for enterprise mobility is providing the right information at right time to the employees who are on the field. Their productivity can be increased two fold if there have the information which will help them for instance to close a sales order, or to get information on the service call. This is where Atos has built a solution called Feet On Street targeted for people who are always on the move providing them the information on time helping them has designed the solution to cater to a host of users who range from Field sales agents and Contract employees all the way up to the CXOs and vendors/partners. The all expansive solution can help an enterprise take care of sales, after sales, collection, marketing, audit & compliance, project task management and supply chain management to name a few. The product has highly scalable and robust solution architecture. The cloud based platform is available as an enterprise model or on a pay per use model. It also provides ready connectors/adaptors that help integration with any back end enterprise system.

The innovative company has added contextual mobility solutions to its portfolio of services as well. These services help businesses take benefit from the mobility of the end users to interact with him outside the usual distribution channel, enhance his experience but also gather his context to optimize services and define new business model with partners. Contextual mobility can extend to several fields such as, telematics services or healthcare to name a few.

Turning Businesses Social

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