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1.
| Company Questions
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| 1.1 | What is the footprint of Axway in the B2B Software and B2B Services market?
- Largest independent IT analyst firm considers Axway as a leader in the B2B Middleware Software market, ranked number 1 in Europe and number 2 worldwide. Several thousand customers are using Axway technology to manage their B2B transactions around the world.
- Axway has more than 20 years of experience in designing, developing and improving technologies in the specific area of B2B platforms.
- Axway B2B software products have been used by many B2B/B2G services providers, who leverage Axway Synchrony's completeness and robustness to interconnect thousands of trading partners and public administrations.
- Axway has developed a strong professional services organization, with several hundreds of consultants within Europe. They assist customers in every phase of their B2B projects, from opportunity and feasibility studies to implementation projects.
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| 1.2 | What is the footprint of Atos Origin in the B2B Services market?
- Atos Origin Managed Operations processes billions of transactions each year for medium and large enterprises world-wide. From the data centers located in the Netherlands, 400 million transactions are managed per year.
- With a 10-year track record in the market, Atos Origin continuously delivers and supports true 24x7 B2B services to customers with Atos Origin's flexible workforce of highly skilled staff, working in harmony across multiple time zones, using state of the art-technology and a proven set of support processes.
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| 1.3 | What is the history between the two companies?
- Atos Origin and Axway have been working together continuously since the mid-1990s, beginning with Amtrix implementations by Atos Origin. After almost 10 years of collaboration, Atos Origin has more than 100 people trained and experienced in implementing Axway technology.
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| 1.4 | Why did Atos Origin select Axway as its preferred partner?
- Atos Origin evaluated other potential partners in the beginning of the process. The decision by Atos Origin came from several aspects:
- A long-term relationship with Axway that has proven successful
- Axway is profitable and forward-thinking
- Axway is identified as a B2B leader by the market
Overall, this matched Atos Origin's goal to become a worldwide leader by sharing the same strategic vision about SaaS with another worldwide leader. Finally, the choice of Axway satisfied another desire to work with a partner with a strong European base, in terms of customers, revenue, growth and margin.
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| 1.5 | Why did Axway select Atos Origin as its preferred partner?
- Having adopted a strategic direction towards a SaaS offering, Axway evaluated different alternatives to enter this market. Working with a partner would mean faster time to market, reduced investment and less risk. So a solid partner was needed. Axway was looking for a European leader with a worldwide presence, going in the same strategic direction, with a strong belief in the B2B SaaS market. Axway already had experience handling managed services, hosted operations, and SaaS services, but not at the geographical and strategic scope desired. Axway finally selected Atos Origin because of their ability to deliver and execute, and their level of SLA and customer satisfaction commitments.
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| 1.6 | Why do these two companies coming together make the best possible offering?
- With our combined strengths — assets, resources, knowledge — and limited investments, we are able to implement a service quickly and efficiently for our customers. The cost of jointly developing a service is very low compared to doing it alone. This will definitely bring a value and benefit to the customer.
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| 1.7 | What are the responsibilities of each party?
- Atos Origin and Axway have signed an alliance agreement describing a detailed governance model. In general, Atos Origin is the prime contractor, but we are committed to delivering the complete service while respecting each other's strengths. Key highlights concerning our governance include joint marketing, joint pre-sales and joint sales. Delivery and support of the services is the responsibility of Atos Origin. Software delivery, maintenance and support are the responsibility of Axway. The customer implementation project and the change management phases associated with it are the responsibility of both parties.
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| 1.8 | How big is your international network of field experts?
- For Europe, Atos Origin and Axway together have at least 1,000 integration experts. Regardless of the country where the customer is, we can deploy the required resources from our respective regions. We have support centers in Eindhoven (the Netherlands), Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Singapore.
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| 1.9 | What is the nature of the partnership?
- This is an alliance based on sharing responsibility, risk and reward. The essence of the agreement is that no single party can achieve final objectives alone.
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| 1.10 | How is your delivery organized?
- Atos Origin has geographical support centers with front offices in Singapore, Eindhoven (the Netherlands) and Sao Paolo (Brazil), covering global business hours. The back office in Mumbai is manned 7 x 24. No matter where you are located, or where your trading partners are located, the support is available.
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2.
| Solution/Technology Questions
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| 2.1 | What is the name of the offering?
- "B2Bi On Demand" or "B2B Integration On Demand"
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| 2.2 | What is included in the B2B Integration SaaS offering?
- Atos Origin and Axway consider a B2B Integration service to be comprised of several activities, including trading partner community management, protocol and communication management, brokering and transforming of electronic transactions, end-to-end visibility, traceability, and business activity monitoring.
- The Atos Origin and Axway offering is a one-stop-shop for B2B Integration service provisioning, based on Axway's Synchrony technology and Atos Origin's worldwide datacenters and support centers. Beyond this operational excellence and software offering, the Atos Origin and Axway team of B2B Integration SaaS experts will use their solid understanding of customers' needs to design and develop the specific implementation of the B2B Integration SaaS services, mapping the customers' business needs related to B2B transactions. As customer needs evolve, the Atos Origin and Axway team of B2B Integration SaaS experts will ensure continued agility of the B2B Integration SaaS services through responsive change management.
- Our service pricing is transaction-based and not kilobyte-based.
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| 2.3 | Do you offer the same SLA to all customers or specific SLA to specific customers?
- Our SLAs are highly standardized. However, we are flexible enough to cover the specific needs of any given customer. It's a matter of finding the right balance of operational excellence and customer intimacy. For example, a common SLA that we will propose is a standard service level of 99.9% 7 x 24. Examples on being flexible are local languages, onsite support, local presence, using customer's ITIL processes and tooling. The standard offering will have basic dashboards and reports, but we will provide the option to customize for specific business activities.
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| 2.4 | Do you offer contractual obligations regarding these SLAs? What if you fall behind the SLA?
- It is a joint service from Atos Origin and Axway, so both parties are contractually committed to the SLA. Options in case of failure depend on the size of the customer. A mechanism of bonus/malus is negotiated and customized for each customer.
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| 2.5 | How much is standard? How far can this offering still be customized?
- Before any further comment, we have to state that what is standardized is the infrastructure, the software architecture and the processes. We are not prescribing to our customers the way they should manage their business processes. We are able to support almost any business processes.
- Even though we will be using a common infrastructure to manage our customers, depending on customer needs, we will be flexible enough to support different connection options, different communication channels — we are not limited to any one network provider or Telco operator.
- The customer implementation project is, by definition, the means by which we customize the trading partner management process and the brokering and transforming of B2B transactions to the customer's specification. The level of customization depends on the level needed by the customer.
- Similarly, the customer implementation project is where the customization of specific business activity dashboards will take place.
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| 2.6 | How do you ensure successfully migrating to SaaS?
- We have a methodology in place that expedites the migration path to SaaS. We expect that the steps of this implementation methodology will require at least 3 months:
- Step 1 is a workshop (2 days).
- Step 2 is the business case and proposal (3 weeks).
- Step 3 is a proof-of-concept (4 weeks).
- Step 4 is to launch the project (design 3 weeks, migrate the 1st interfaces in 2 weeks). During the project phase, the design step will determine how much we customize to fulfill customer needs.
- Step 5 is the production stage.
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| 2.7 | What is the average implementation effort?
- There is no average timing. For the first interface it could go as fast as a month from project kickoff to production if the customer is already using an Axway technology. This is possible due to the proven methodology and project resources already trained, experienced, and in place. Subsequent migrations of interfaces moving towards production will be done in concert with the customer to ensure business continuity. It will not make a huge difference if the customer uses a technology that is not from Axway.
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| 2.8 | What are your datacenter facilities?
- Atos Origin's state-of-the-art data-centers are designed to deliver optimal support for mission critical services. All Atos Origin data centers are ISO27001 / BS7799 certified and are monitored according to the latest technological developments by our Building Information System (BIS). BIS enables the constant monitoring of humidity, dust levels, smoke and gas levels.
- Our TIERIII compliant datacenters in the Netherlands are currently being targeted for delivering the infrastructure for B2B services to our customers world-wide.
- A "twinning"-architecture will provide high-availability, redundancy and fail-over functionalities.
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| 2.9 | What are the state-of-the-art methodology certifications with which you comply?
- ISO 9001-2000, ISO 27001, SEI CMMI Level 5, ITIL, and Prince 2 are just some of the certifications that Atos Origin will apply to B2B Integration On Demand services.
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3.
| Benefits Questions
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| 3.1 | What are the specific benefits of the Atos Origin + Axway offering?
- Benefits related to cost reduction:
- We build a business case together with the customer and are committed to that agreement.
- Benefits related to cost transparency:
- We predict what might be your future usage in the form of a 6-month rolling forecast.
- Benefits related to risk reduction:
- Atos Origin has experience in managing infrastructure, handling availability to 99.9%, with a disaster recovery process in place for years, and of being compliant to the best-of-breed governance standards.
- Axway brings immediate access to best-of-breed technology innovation. The customer benefits from innovation on an on-going basis. This includes communication protocols, message formats, B2B process management standards, security standards, etc.
- Benefits related to cost proportional to business:
- We guarantee a cost that is proportional to business activity because our pricing is per B2B transaction instead of kilobyte-based.
- We can evaluate immediate business activity, meaning immediate costs. Based on this, we offer business line managers a way of following their activity in real-time.
- Benefits related to not isolating the B2B services from the information system:
- We recognize that each B2B interface belongs to a wider business process that may span from the internal information system to the trading partner information systems. Our offering is able to quickly facilitate that overall business process control through true bi-directional, end-to-end information monitoring.
- Benefits related to attractive pricing:
- By combining the assets of a large SI and a leading B2B software provider, we are able to set up the service with a low upfront investment, resulting in the ability to propose a competitive price.
- We expect that, depending on the situation, the Return on Investment can be reached within 1-2 years.
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| 3.2 | You claim your service quickly consolidates and expands your customers' current B2B IT environment. What is the benefit?
- The transition project to B2B Integration On Demand is between 3 and 6 months long, for large and complex companies. After the first month, the first interface can go to production. From that point, the customer benefits from complete Trading Partner Management (on-boarding a new partner is nothing more than a change request) and all leading B2B standards. Moreover, the availability of B2B expertise within the customer organization is no longer a bottleneck.
- In most cases, large companies have several different IT environments and multiple software combination that operate B2B document exchanges, following their silo organization. Consolidation of these environments is done at no cost once it is done following a SaaS mode.
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