Nostalgia

Sparked this morning by reading the piece about Atos in the Financial Times at reference 1, Atos being a large, French IT services company, deeply involved in various matters of national importance, and now in a spot of bother. With the French fretting about the possibility of a foreigner - a Francophile Czech - getting his paws on a slice of the action. Something which I suspect that our own Tories are far more relaxed about, with their touching faith in the benign workings of markets. Faith which conveniently dresses up their aversion to interfering with the affairs of the very rich.

What would they say or do if an Anglophile Czech wanted to buy a slice of the nuclear submarine building operation up in meat and potato pie town - that is to say Barrow-in-Furness? How would their aversion shape up to their traditionally soft spot for defence?

Back with Atos, before the nostalgia kicked in, I learned that they now occupy very flashy looking offices on the banks of the Seine, in a municipality called Bezons on the northwestern outskirts of Paris. A place once better known for its stance vis-à-vis Palestine. Offices which don't seem to come with flashy hoardings announcing their presence, at least not that I could see in Street View.

I have had two encounters with Atos, the first when I was at the Treasury, the second when I was at the Home Office. Sadly, neither resulted in important meetings to be attended at said flashy offices near Paris.

The first encounter started with another IT services company called Origen, swallowed up by Atos in 2000. The work was helping to look after our document management system, work which might not have involved Paris, but which did involve the odd beverage.

The second started with yet another IT services company, then part of the oil services outfit Schlumberger, sold off to Atos in 2004. Here the work was helping to build an ambitious crime flavoured system on top of Microsoft's then fairly new .NET framework. Not much in the way of beverages, but we did have an attractive sales lady who had cut her teeth as a chartered accountant for one of the big four - or was it five then? - perhaps Price Waterhouse. She knew all about being to sent up to the top of big piles of materials of one sort or another to make sure that they were all there, while everyone else stood around and watched. She also, as I recall, made a practise of driving her car bare footed. Which seems a bit odd now, but that is the recollection none the less.

I had thought that Atos would have been noticed from time to time in the past, but search reveals just five mentions, two of them to do with our late Christmas cactus, one of them to do with a wine grower and all bar one through the Schlumberger connection. With the only substantive one being that at reference 4.

PS: a waking thought. What sort of a country has policemen - or at least security people - who are prepared to chuck non-violent political dissenters out of tenth floor windows? This sort of thing seeming to be reasonably common in today's Russia. We might have issues with our own policemen, but not in this sort of way.

References

Reference 1: Saving Atos: Jean-Pierre Mustier handed one of France’s messiest rescue missions: Former UniCredit boss steps into governance and political quagmire to turn around indebted tech contractor - Adrienne Klasa, Leila Abboud, Sarah White, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atos.

Reference 3: https://atos.net/en/.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/11/impending-doom.html.