Following today’s news (14 June) that Atos plans to split into two publicly listed companies;

Rob Anderson, Research Director at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

“Atos is a named strategic supplier to the UK government with a deep public sector footprint. In fact, according to GlobalData’s spend by supplier data, Atos was the third largest supplier to the UK public sector in the financial year (FY) 2020-21. It has live contracts worth nearly £1.5 billion across the public sector as a whole (close to £1 billion excluding framework agreements), with annual spending in FY2020-21 worth £593 million.

“Key contracts cover hosting and application support for the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), support services for Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities and, just recently, managed services supporting the provision of personal independent payments for the Department for Work and Pensions.”

Rob Stoneman, Service Director at GlobalData, comments:

“The strategy follows that of IBM which spun out its own legacy IT infrastructure business into a new company, Kyndryl, in November 2021 so that it could focus on the cloud services market. Atos is following the same strategy, spinning out digital, cloud migration, and big data and security business (named Evidian) from its legacy infrastructure management services business (which will remain as Atos).

“However, the split will mean that several live contracts, including those worth £216 million with the Student Loans Company, £135 million with DEFRA and £40 million with the BBC, will be at greater risk due to elements now being straddled across two companies.”