Ref. Ares(2020)1062302 - 19/02/2020
EUROPEAN COMMISSION
Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs
Space Policy, Copernicus and Defence
Director
Brussels,
Dir.I
Flash Report
Directorate I
Meeting/Date
13 October 2015
Subject
Meeting with ATOS
Participants
(I3),
(
(Atos),
Unit in charge
I3
Report: Atos presented the company and their acquisition of Siemens IT branch, BULL
and XEROX IT reinforcing their activity in the software, hardware and user base. Atos
has the capacity to be a European wide player with a range of ICT services for big
European players like Thales, Safran, Airbus. Atos has a strong electronic payment
activity.
Atos became an ICT platform service provider in EO through its investment in different
projects: HelixNebula, PEPS, SPARKINDATA and the not yet (signed) H2020 project
EO4wildlife financed by DG GROW.
Helix Nebula is a cloud provider consortium with a market place for providing cloud
services to the client. Atos will meet ESA at the end of the month to better understand if
ESA is interested to further use the solution provided. The Helix Nebula consortium
would like to have a clear signal before engaging more investment.
Sparkindata seems to be a very interesting project mixing cloud computing technology,
big data EO data both in situ and remote sensing. This is a consortium with 11 partners.
The business models of the different stakeholders in access platforms were discussed
with the discussion concentrating more specifically on the ICT services needed.
Commission européenne/Europese Commissie, 1049 Bruxelles/Brussel, BELGIQUE/BELGIË - Tel. +32 22991111
Atos claimed that they were capable to provide a tailor made solutions using their recent
acquisition like Siemens and Bull to provide a whole portfolio of services. They fully
understand that the EO market need to be promoted with a key role for the ICT platform
provider to help EO SMEs to concentrate on their value adding activity rather than in
ICT issues.
It was requested by agencies that Atos works on platform architecture with distributed
data centres reflecting the actual distribution of the data centres throughout Europe. The
Commission would prefer a neutral assessment of the efficiency of the different access
platforms, leaving the choice of the central or distributed nature of the architecture at a
later stage since digital solution can ensure that the final services to the users is provided
next to users and preferably in their own language while the heavy duty of storage and
processing of the different datasets could be done elsewhere. A European platform will
need to compete with strong US platforms with no other imperative than efficiency and
cost, there is therefore no reason to put European platform at a disadvantage by design.
The Commission asked Atos to provide information on their platforms and Atos
proposed to invite the Commission to a SparkInData demonstrator.
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