Speculation: Atos IT Services, Cybersecurity Buyout Offers Coming?

Global IT consulting company Atos could receive buyout offers from multiple companies, a Reuters report suggests. The speculation involves private equity potentially buying the core Atos IT consulting business, and Thales potentially acquiring the Atos cybersecurity and MSSP business operations.

Still, a Atos spokesperson told Reuters that the cybersecurity division is not up for sale. And nobody has gone on-the-record to say such offers for Atos assets are on the way.

Atos: Focused on Turnaround

Speculation about future Atos ownership surfaces at a somewhat surprising time.

Indeed, Atos announced a new CEO and completed the Cloudreach acquisition in January 2022. The moves reinforced an Atos effort to accelerate a shift towards monthly recurring revenues (MRR), managed cloud services, and SaaS-oriented application migrations.

Among the challenges for new Atos CEO Rodolphe Belmer: The company has 107,000 employees and worldwide scale. But revenue growth has been inconsistent — especially compared to cloud-centric MSPs and MSSPs that are riding the managed services and cybersecurity market waves.

Amid that market reality, Atos has been acquiring various cloud-centric MSPs, MSSPs and IT consulting firms.

Story published February 2, 2022. Updated February 3 to reflect Atos stating cybersecurity unit is not up for sale.