Atos

Atos SE, a French-headquartered global IT services company with approximately €11 billion in revenue (2021) and over 110,000 employees, operated one of the largest data center footprints in the European IT services industry. Following years of acquisitions (Bull, Xerox ITO, Syntel, and others), Atos had accumulated over 100 data centers worldwide — many running legacy infrastructure, duplicating capabilities across geographies, and carrying high fixed costs for power, cooling, and facilities management. Data center and infrastructure hosting costs represented a disproportionate share of Atos's cost of revenue, contributing to operating margins well below peer benchmarks. Many facilities were operating at 30-50% utilization, with legacy clients on old contracts that did not justify the infrastructure footprint.

As part of its transformation program launched in 2021, Atos undertook a systematic infrastructure rationalization:

• Data center consolidation: Identified and began closing underutilized data centers, targeting a reduction from 100+ facilities to a smaller, more efficient core network. Each closure required careful client migration planning and contract renegotiation, executed over 12-24 month timelines per facility.
• Cloud migration of internal workloads: Migrated Atos's own internal IT systems and delivery platforms to public cloud (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), reducing the company's dependency on its owned infrastructure for internal operations and demonstrating cloud capability to clients.
• Hybrid cloud standardization: Deployed standardized hybrid cloud management platforms across remaining data centers, enabling automated workload placement between on-premises and public cloud based on cost and performance requirements. This improved utilization of retained facilities from 30-50% to targeted levels of 70%+.
• Client workload migration: Proactively engaged hosting clients on migration to cloud or modernized infrastructure, converting legacy fixed-price hosting contracts to variable cloud-consumption models that better aligned Atos's cost structure with revenue.
• Energy efficiency investments: Invested in power and cooling upgrades at retained data centers to reduce energy costs per rack unit, achieving PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) improvements that reduced operating costs independent of consolidation.

• Facility reduction: Atos reduced its data center count significantly as part of the multi-year consolidation program, eliminating redundant facilities and their associated fixed costs.
• Infrastructure cost reduction: Data center consolidation and energy efficiency improvements contributed to reductions in infrastructure-related operating costs, though these savings were partially offset by cloud migration investment costs during the transition period.
• Utilization improvement: Remaining data centers achieved higher utilization rates through workload consolidation, improving the revenue-per-square-foot economics of the retained footprint.
• ISG recognition: Atos was named a Leader in Private/Hybrid Cloud Data Center Services by Information Service Group (ISG), validating the quality of its modernized infrastructure operations.
• Client migration: Successfully migrated significant client workloads to cloud and hybrid environments, converting legacy fixed-price contracts to more flexible consumption models.
• Timeframe: Consolidation program launched 2021, with closures and migrations executing through 2023.

• Atos's leadership in decarbonization commitments provided an additional rationale for closing inefficient older data centers, aligning cost reduction with ESG goals
• Partnerships with hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) provided migration tools and co-investment that reduced the cost of transitioning client workloads
• Post-acquisition duplication made the consolidation opportunity unusually large, with obvious redundancies from Bull, Xerox ITO, and Syntel integrations
• European data sovereignty requirements meant that some data center capacity had to be retained, preventing an all-cloud migration and preserving a revenue base for retained facilities