Outlook

GREATER SERVICES, DEMATERIALISATION, FEATURES... AND SIMPLICITY

 
Atos Worldline business lines are exciting because they are at the center of a booming economy, one of continual invention and in which technical limits and our imagination are in perpetual interaction. Developments in Atos Worldline business lines focus on 3 strategic areas: regulations, uses and technology.

Regulatory changes have a direct impact on innovation strategy. To continue to provide a service, systems must be built or adapted, for example to comply with new security standards. Domestic, European and international regulations help to define new standards. The challenge represented by SEPA is one of the more structuring issues: to build a Single Euro Payments Area. Regulation in this case is helping to open up a new market for payments: the euro area, driven by a wave of consolidation and the emergence of global solutions which require tailored technological solutions.

The development of mobile applications, the rise of electronic communities and the daily use of e-services are all trends that we integrate directly in the developments of our business lines. Uses, or the ways in which the public takes ownership of the tools at its disposal are also carefully observed and anticipated by Atos Worldline. The emergence of applications that replace the Internet browser on mobile phones in order to access an online service represents one of these key trends.

For Air France we have therefore developed an e-ticket service available on a mobile phone with a dedicated application. Phones are becoming a means of electronic authentication, enabling us to imagine new composite applications. We are already working on the effective combination of telephony and payment solutions. Among the other changes anticipated in 2009, for example, we dematerialised loyalty cards by offering them only on mobile phones, with the launch of our Worldline Brand In Pocket (BIP) solution.

Technological developments are the third focus for the development of our business lines. We are continuously connected to global innovation whether in hardware or software systems. Our solutions meet the expectations of players wishing to use the novel features enabled by the processing capabilities of new networks, or the convergence of peripherals. A mainstream trend in these technological developments is the emergence of a new type of communication: the exchange of critical data between machines (M2M). These strategic exchanges require our expertise because they involve absolute security and industrial scale information processing capabilities (see the example opposite). Atos Worldline initiated a strategic partnership in 2009 with Sierra Wireless to provide a response to the massification of the European "Machine to Machine" market. M2M will face new perspectives that are open-ended, ever-changing, multi-purpose and multi-user.

This equally applies to the development of tomorrow's cities, which will use information technology to serve their intelligence and coordinate their networks (water, electricity, gas) and services, in order to gain in environmental efficiency. In cases such as these, information and data management is a key issue, and the expertise of Atos Worldline can help organise and process the exchanges, and provide management interfaces to use the data generated by users and the millions of smart meters located in the city.

Optimising Maintenance Through Dialogue Between Machines

This is the objective of EADS-Airbus , who has chosen Atos Worldline to host their critical data exchange applications between in-flight aircrafts and the maintenance center on the ground. The idea is to use the on-board diagnostics systems equipping the aircraft to gain time on the ground, for example with the advance preparation of replacement parts. The flow of information generated by the machines is expected to grow rapidly, and represents a major data-processing challenge.