Tech Foundations is the Atos business line leading in managed services, focusing on hybrid cloud infrastructure, employee experience and technology services, through decarbonised, automated, and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled solutions. Its 52,000 employees advance what matters to the world’s businesses, institutions, and communities. It is present in 69 countries, with an annual revenue of €6 billion.
As the Country Manager for Tech Foundations in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan, Neville Smith tells us more about the Malaysia delivery centres for Tech Foundations, which support both Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Digital Workplace services. This article explores the development of services supported by Malaysia, including the growth in local multilingual Digital Workplace services and the establishment of cyber recovery services for global and local support.
INTRODUCTION
In Asia Pacific, Tech Foundations is present in 10 countries with more than 11,000 talents and 300 clients.
Recently, Tech Foundations announced the renewal of a five-year contract in Australia to deliver hybrid cloud and core infrastructure services for public healthcare.
The company will continue to deliver cutting-edge technology solutions tailored specifically to support the ongoing digitalisation of health records and systems, helping ensure that the Western Australia community continues to receive a healthcare standard that is among the highest in the world.
In China, Tech Foundations has renewed its Value-Added Telecommunication Services (VATS) licenses, enabling it to run world-class digital services and data centres across the country.
Atos Cloud Computing has retained the licenses since 2019, being the first authorised, foreign-funded company to operate cloud computing, VATS-regulated activities in several Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, and Wuhan.
“Core to what we do is ensuring the integrity of our clients’ data,” opens Neville Smith, Country Manager for Atos’ Tech Foundations operations in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan.
“Over time, I have seen the evolution of outsourced managed IT services, progressing from purely taking over a client’s operations, through evolving solutions and offerings on a utility basis, to today’s hybrid, multi-cloud environments,” he observes.
Smith has been a vital part of the Asia Pacific segment of the company for over 20 years and has been heavily involved in providing the technical foundations for clients in banking, manufacturing, telecommunications (telecoms), and healthcare.
CREATING DIGITAL FOUNDATIONS
Tech Foundations helps its 1,200 customers grow their business through creative use of technology and open ecosystems to address not only today’s challenges, but also those of tomorrow.
Its customers face the challenges of implementing digital transformation in a context where IT ownership costs are rising and there is an evolving mix of legacy and next-generation technologies. These enterprises need to accelerate often complex migrations to multi-cloud environments, whilst maintaining sovereignty and meeting regulatory frameworks.
Leveraging an agile employee base and a customer-centric, industrialised, and automated operating model, Tech Foundations supports its customers to meet these challenges by:
- Creating the workplace of tomorrow, optimising workplace environments, and running mission critical operations 24/7.
- Managing the complexity of a multi- cloud environment and modernising application development.
- Providing trusted private and sovereign cloud platforms while meeting compliance requirements.
Tech Foundations in Asia Pacific offers a portfolio of hybrid cloud infrastructure and employee experience through decarbonised, automated, and AI-enabled solutions.
In Malaysia, Atos has built a delivery centre to support its core offerings for both global and regional clients. With its multicultural background, the centre provides operations in English, Bahasa Malay, and several Chinese/Indian dialects. In addition, local language support is provided in Thai, Japanese, Indonesian, and Korean.
The two core businesses are tailored to answer specific or transversal challenges:
- Hybrid and cloud infrastructure: “If we take a closer look at the Asia Pacific infrastructure continuum, it becomes evident that the successful delivery of infrastructure services necessitates a mastery of hybrid, multi-cloud solutions. This mastery is where we truly set ourselves apart and has earned us recognition as a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant,” says Smith.
“Drawing upon extensive experience spanning two decades in traditional infrastructure, coupled with an adeptness in hybrid cloud technologies, Atos has been instrumental in guiding numerous clients through the intricacies of cloud migration. An emphasis on Sovereign Cloud is aimed at achieving a harmonious equilibrium between sovereignty and cost-effectiveness.”
- Digital workplace: Provides end-to-end employee experience through digital collaboration and productivity tools, as well as intelligent customer care services.
“The market shows strong conviction in the relationship between company performance and engaged employees. Research indicates that engaged individuals can drive up to 23 percent more performance and Atos believes that the workplace plays a crucial role in fostering employee engagement,” comments Smith.
The company’s multi-lingual portfolio has been augmented with an immersive experience and generative AI, leveraging customers a more efficient and effective way of communicating. In fact, Atos is working closely with Microsoft on their newly launched co-pilot services.
“We substantially innovated how we provided these solutions by right-shoring operations, introducing virtualisation, and increasing levels of automation. However, our core has always been a solid team of experts running operations that our clients can rely on,” Smith adds.
INDUSTRY-WIDE REACH
Tech Foundations’ services expand across a variety of industries and governmental institutions, including financial services and banking; healthcare and life sciences; manufacturing; telecoms and media; and the public sector and defence.
The storage demands from clients have altered from relatively low volumes of data on a spinning desk, backed up onto tapes that were shipped to offsite and cross-site locations, to today’s vast volumes of data that are kept in solid-state fast storage.
These facilities offer compression, deduplication techniques, and encryption, which can be backed up automatically to remote locations on the cloud. Furthermore, to enhance cyber threat protection, air-gaped cyber vaults have been established, allowing a clean copy of backups of critical data to be available for cyber recovery if required.
In Malaysia, the delivery centre provides world-class infrastructure management, which includes different teams managing infrastructure, storage, and backup, supporting local, regional, and global customers.
The systems managed by the team in Malaysia range from physical and virtual servers, network, storage, middleware, and databases, to mainframe operations and cloud.
To ensure recovery after a cyber event, the team works with the cybersecurity operations centre to analyse the data in the air gapped cyber vault to ensure the copy is clean. If required, the clean vault can be used as the source for cyber recovery. The core team supporting such services is based in the company’s operations centre in Cyberjaya, Malaysia.
Such technologies set Atos apart from its competitors, enabling greater influential reach as the data industry shifts to an international mindset.
“At the end of the day, it’s all about providing innovative technical solutions for our clients, freeing up their time so they can focus on their own business knowing they are in safe hands, whilst providing an exciting environment for our teams to flourish and grow,” Smith elaborates.
“It’s very rewarding to step into our operations centre in Malaysia and witness the growth from a few hundred programmers 20 years ago to over 1,000 experts, working across globally connected operations managing our clients’ technology foundations for both Infrastructure and Digital Workplace,” highlights Smith.
“It’s very rewarding to step into our operations centre in Malaysia and witness the growth from a few hundred programmers 20 years ago to over 1,000 experts working across globally connected operations”
Neville Smith, Country Manager for tech foundations in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Japan, Atos
ON THE TECHNICAL HORIZON
As the company looks to the future, Atos highly anticipates the next steps in the digital infrastructure and cloud connectivity space.
- Multi-cloud adoption and modernisation: Generative AI services are becoming more prevalent, contributing to flexibility and resilience in the face of evolving technical landscapes.
- Evolution towards Intelligent Connectivity: From an evolutionary standpoint, there’s a noticeable shift in products. They are moving away from being hardware-centric to becoming more intelligently connected and autonomous. This development is primarily driven by advancements in software and data services.
- Distributed Architecture: The increasing distribution of architecture adds complexity to core business operations. The emergence of edge computing combined with vision AI for safety and compliance is notable. Managing this complexity is a challenge, but it presents a favourable position for Atos.
- Commercial Models and Sustainability Prioritisation: In terms of commercial models, there is a prioritisation of customer intimacy. The focus is on co-creation and exploring use cases centred around pay-per-use and pay-per-outcome arrangements. Sustainability is a significant focus, anticipating heavy investments, especially in light of upcoming regulatory announcements regarding sustainability performance.
The company further looks forward to being a vital element of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Atos has been the worldwide IT Partner of the Olympic and Paralympic Games for the last 20 years. It secures and orchestrates all the IT systems behind the games, including over 150 critical IT applications to manage and broadcast the games.
Paris 2024 will be Atos’ 12th consecutive Olympic Games and ninth Paralympic Games as the Worldwide IT Partner. As the lead integrator, the company will orchestrate over 150 key applications to manage and broadcast both Games, manage the 300,000 applications received on the volunteer portal, and conduct 250,000 hours of testing to ensure a safe and secure delivery.
Atos is also the Official Technology Partner for UEFA National Team Football (UNTF), delivering technological support for UNTF and its competitions. It manages and secures the underlaying hybrid-cloud environment and the infrastructure required to host UEFA’s services, applications, and data.
In addition to the activities related to the organisation of UEFA events, Atos also provides a full range of services – with advanced Digital Workplace, user support, and network solutions – to optimise UEFA’s IT operations and improve the internal user experience.
