Atos announces blueKiwi ZEN, the most advanced SaaS Enterprise Social Software

Enabling a new level of enterprise communication and collaboration for superior business performance

Webcast 7 November 2012 at 11 am (CET) with Gilles Grapinet, Senior Executive Vice President, Atos and JL Valente, CEO at blueKiwi, an Atos company — Register here

Paris, 8-11-2012 — /europawire.eu/ — Atos announces that blueKiwi, an Atos company since April 2012, today releases blueKiwi ZEN, the most advanced, feature-packed release of its SaaS enterprise social software. blueKiwi ZEN takes social networking to a new level of capabilities, offering organisations of all sizes the chance to communicate and collaborate better, as well as organize, process and share information smarter. All so they can shorten business and decision cycles and outperform their competition.

The launch today of blueKiwi ZEN marks an important milestone in the Atos Cloud and SaaS strategy. The Group is entering the newly emerging Social IT market, which will see social tools and solutions increasingly adopted in a SaaS mode by industry leaders to increase business performance and improve the working environment. blueKiwi benefits as well from the underpinning cloud expertise of Atos to deliver unmatched service reliability, security and availability requested by clients who expect first-class entreprise-grade IT services.

Commenting on the launch, Gilles Grapinet, Senior Executive Vice President, Atos said: “Social Business is a revolution in the workplace that will help our customers to push business performance higher while improving work life balance of employees. Following our acquisition of blueKiwi earlier this year and thanks to the depth and breadth of Atos business technology expertise in cloud, mobility, we can now offer the best European solution to clients who want to benefit from leading social collaboration features.”

blueKiwi ZEN aims to provide superior communication, collaboration and information processing capabilities by delivering a higher level of simplicity, functionality, and performance in getting things done. ZEN also affords employees a level of situational awareness that enables them to collaborate more effectively, focus on what’s important, mobilize the right individuals and stay on top of their projects and workload. It helps users filter and prioritize information and take decisive action. Its powerful recommendation engine leverages both social and interest graph to suggest new connections between people, communities and documents, unlocking new collaboration opportunities and increasing the collective knowledge of the organization.

Karine Lazimi, Head of Innovation and communities management at Allianz said: “We have many employees who have been using blueKiwi for four years. It has transformed how we collaborate and is now indispensable in our workplace. Thanks to blueKiwi we have enhanced our internal communication and it has improved our daily job for 2000 employees as a today. We welcome the added functionalities and performance that the new version of blueKiwi and are interested to explore how this can help support our organisation further.”

This major release draws on blueKiwi’s outstanding social networking know-how as well as Atos world-class position in workplace management and award-winning Cloud and Zero emailTM initiatives to offer the most complete, high performance, and secure enterprise social software solution while complying with local data protection regulations. With this release social capabilities can be seamlessly integrated into the existing IT infrastructure, application landscape, enterprise portals and business applications.

JL Valente, CEO at blueKiwi said: “With ZEN we are aiming to bring enterprise social software to the mainstream and turn it into a business-critical application. We’ve specifically designed it to become the social hub of the workplace where email is out and collaborative activities get done.”

Atos will internally roll-out blueKiwi ZEN as a key technology component to support its internal Zero EmailTM initiative. This global program aims to transform Atos into a social organisation, with a better work-life balance for employees, increased business synergies and efficiency, anticipating the work environment of the future.

blueKiwi features and operational model

Highlights of this latest release include a new, state-of-the-art, drag-and-drop user interface, smart previewing capabilities with one click, a separate notification stream, stronger publication versioning, advanced collaborative notes, @mention and hashtags, superfast auto-suggestions and search, likes, a full-fledged recommendation engine, Microsoft Office and Outlook add-ins, new native mobile applications for iOS, Android and BlackBerry, and a new set of API’s. It works on any mobile device, tablet or PC.

Atos will operate the Cloud infrastructure supporting blueKiwi ZEN, on its Cloud platform Canopy, the Cloud JV built by Atos with its partners EMC and VMWare, providing the highest standards in term of quality of service.

blueKiwi comes in three editions; Professional, Premium, and Enterprise, each designed to meet the needs and requirements of organizations of all sizes.

About Atos

Atos is an international information technology services company with annual 2011 pro forma revenue of EUR 8.5 billion and 74,000 employees in 48 countries. Serving a global client base, it delivers hi-tech transactional services, consulting and managed services. With its deep technology expertise and industry knowledge, it works with clients across the following market sectors: Manufacturing, Retail, Services; Public, Health & Transports; Financial Services; Telecoms, Media & Technology; Energy & Utilities. Atos is focused on business technology that powers progress and helps organizations to create their firm of the future. It is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic and Paralympics Games and is quoted on the Paris Eurolist Market. Atos operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting & Technology Services, Atos Worldline and Atos Worldgrid.

About blueKiwi

An innovative technology leader, blueKiwi is Europe’s largest SaaS provider of Enterprise Social Software. We help enterprises worldwide increase their business performance through social collaboration. blueKiwi has been consistently recognized by industry expert Gartner Inc. since 2007.
Since becoming an Atos company in early 2012, blueKiwi has leveraged Atos’ global presence and Cloud technology expertise to further evolve our powerful SaaS solution. blueKiwi’s focus on enterprise social networks, combined with Atos’s broader product and service portfolio, creates a powerful combination that enables us to offer further value to our customers through a unique blend of consultancy, innovation, and implementation.

For more information contact:

Caroline Crouch
Atos
Email: caroline.crouch@atos.net