Relationships with regional and global customers are changing says Francis Meston, Atos

Francis Meston, Group Executive Vice President, CEO MEA, Atos, talks to GEC Media Group’s Editor Arun Shankar, that relationships with customers are changing. In the past Atos may have relied on its outsourcing and managed services contracts with large enterprises and government accounts. But this model is changing not only in the GCC but globally as well. Digital transformation requires a much quicker response time, and time to market agility. Meston points out that the rigid contracts of outsourcing, that are not very flexible, and are very structured, work well for outsourcing of applications and infrastructure, but do not work anymore for digital transformation.

Says Meston: We see a shift in our business from old type of contracts to new type of contracts, where it is more about design and deployment of application in a very agile reactive mode. Customers now not only expect Atos to bring them knowledge about technology, but also understanding of their business and how technology is going to transform their business.

Atos supplies the full value chain of IT including infrastructure, high performance computing, applications, consulting and managed services across the Middle East and Africa. However, Meston does remark that Atos is particularly involved with GCC countries. Atos’ target audience is the government, large enterprises, banking, telecom service providers. Unified communication and high performance computing are driving use case of interest.