IT strategy
| Willy Walraeve Director of Technology Strategy |
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INTERVIEW
What does IT Globalization mean within Atos Worldline?
It is a vast program launched by Atos Worldline in all the countries in which we present, including the countries where we are deploying the High-Tech Transactional Services (HTTS) development strategy. Two goals are pursued. First, in an increasingly competitive context, we aim to optimise our efforts and costs at every level. Secondly, our objective is to strengthen our delivery capacity to provide a powerful, cross-border response to all the new challenges on our markets.
How do you succeed in optimising efforts and cost?
By standardising whatever we can without weakening our offers and sales positions. That means sharing products, platforms and services, upstream of projects, as well in their design and deployment. This allows all of the Atos Worldline teams to take advantage of investments we have already made, whether in Belgium, Germany or France.
What are the new issues that you mentioned earlier?
Under the influence of SEPA, new needs have emerged. The construction of the EU with the free movement of capital and goods and the establishment of the euro area has helped create a single market. But until now, the operation of the single market has still been influenced by differing national standards and techniques. Those differences are disappearing and our customers now operate in several countries, and in several regions. Like us, they want to harmonise their standards and have comprehensive, cross-border tools, but which respect local differences. Our strength lies in providing global, cross-border, standardised, customised technical solutions, and that is our top priority!
What progress have you recently made in IT Globalization?
Significant progress was made in recent months and 2009 was an important year. We completed the first use of the SEPA payment acquisition platform with the operational migration of the first payments. Our production strategy means we can already offer effective solutions, and we have been shortlisted in most of the calls for tender organised by our customers.