In the past days I received a flurry of messages on LinkedIn telling me many people are starting in a new postion at Eviden. All of these were from former Atos employees that have been selected to be part of the company’s carve-out entity for “Digital, Cloud and Cybersecurity”.
The part left behind stands with the name Atos, offers clients “reliable and responsive digital foundations”, and bringing expertise in hybrid cloud, employee experience, AI, and decarbonisation (quote from techmarketview.com).
I want to congratulate the Eviden employees as they have been chosen, were invited or have chosen to be part of the exciting and (expected) profitable part of Atos. Eviden, a play on the word “Evidence”, will start with 57,000 employees and a 2022 indicated revenue of 5bn€.
I have written about the Atos split in various publications (here, here, and here) and have discussed the proposed split in many conversations with investment firms, consultancy companies and various parties that wanted to remain anonymous.
My opinion is and was that the split is a waste of capital and that Atos as a unbroken company has enormous potential; with the right strategy.
Nevertheless it must be exciting for the employees of Eviden to be part of the company that has great potential and growth upside according to the current leadership.
Interesting enough the part that is left behind, now also becomes a new company, stripped of many services, employees and customers. But I am yet to see “I am happy to announce…”-messages from the remaining employees. If the “new positions” messages on LinkedIn are part of an orchestrated marketing, I would have suggested that Atos had chosen to communicate in a more balanced way. The remaining part of Atos employees could and should have communicated to the world of Linkedin with the same pride as their former colleagues about their role in the “New Atos”.
All in all, I am sad that the proposed split is moving forward. In my opinion, with the amount of money that is being invested to carve up the company, a lot of growth could have been created in the old Atos company. Today I see investments that result in a loss.
Disclaimer: Paul, who is the author of this blog post, holds at time of writing a small amount of stocks in Atos SE. All information in this blog post is believed to be public information, enriched with the authors personal opinion. No confidential information is being shared.