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.

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.

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.