Laying The Foundations For Performance
| Frédéric Launoy Vice President in charge of Offers and Development |
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Within Atos Worldline, the Offer & Development Division has a stimulating, strategic mission: to build the company's overall software offer.
The O&D teams must meet a critical challenge: to provide the project teams with high-performance solutions at controlled cost. The objective is to identify the cross-cutting points and solutions in common between our customers' business lines in order to build generic software components that can be adapted to the specific features of each of them. The result of such an approach to development is an unparalleled balance between standardisation and customisation, enabling cost control and high performance.
One example of this strategy of pooling development efforts is the technological overhaul of the European payment platforms. Atos Worldline has opted to switch to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Offers & Development Division has designed a software core common to all the future platforms that will also benefit from the customisation work carried out with each customer.
The same applies to the Worldline Contact solution, which met with great success in 2009. The solution developed by Atos Worldline enables the set-up of an easily customisable virtual contact center. Customer relationship management has many similarities and common standards whatever the nature of the business concerned. This enables the deployment of a generic solution that can be customised in order to lower costs for Atos Worldline customers.
A win-win offer based on the long-term vision of the O&D Division, and on the in-depth knowledge of our customers' core business. The ability to build proprietary software solutions for all of its business lines is unique for a market player with the scale of processing power as important as Atos Worldline. This is one of the other priorities of the O&D Division: to ensure the independence of the enterprise at the software level and create long-term value with unique solutions combining our expertise in e-services and payment.
This dynamic is maintained by a genuine corporate culture of development. Rather than buy turnkey solutions that cannot be modified, we prefer to invest in developing our own solutions that are tailored to our customers' needs. Given this approach, a long-term vision is fundamental, and forward-looking research work must be closely tied to that of the development teams. For this reason, the O&D Division is the focus for research in the classical sense of the term, i.e. long-term research work upstream of applications that cannot always be immediately deployed but which are fundamental for the future.<:p>
The sharing of know-how, the flow of information and innovation are therefore of high importance. Our research teams are at work on a wide range of issues.
Leveraging The Strengths Of Open Source
Atos Worldline is at work on a large number of Open Source projects. This special approach to software development improves the development performance and quality of certain applications. Specifically, Open Source allows Atos Worldline to take over an effective software solution and customise it to suit the requirements of its projects with total control of the source code. Another advantage of Open Source: the opportunity to be involved in and even influence the creation of a software standard as it emerges, thereby ensuring the competitiveness of the solutions developed in-house based on the standard. The balance between Open Source and proprietary development is becoming a key issue in our development policy.