Arnaud Langer

In today’s world data is more valuable than ever. Famously referred to as ‘the new oil’ in 2006 by British mathematician Clive Humby, by 2025 the world is set to produce 463 exabytes of data per day.

But when it comes to harnessing this vast quantity of data, organisations today must focus on creating business value. Illustrating this is Arnaud Langer, Global Managing Partner - Edge & IoT at Atos. 

With more than 15 years of experience in the IT industry, Langer first studied as an electrical engineer, before later moving to Atos. There, his initial projects around connected vehicles not only marked successes in Europe but also paved his way to the US, where he expanded Atos’ offerings in big data, AI and machine learning.

With extensive experience across the fields of IoT and big data, Langer discusses the early days of IoT, where the emphasis was on connectivity for its own sake. “The goal was really to connect everything, without necessarily knowing what we would be able to do with the connected things themselves,” he observes.

This insight extends to big data initiatives, where companies amassed vast data lakes without a clear strategy for deriving value. It was this realisation that spurred a strategic pivot at Atos, under Langer's leadership, to focus on the end goal of creating business value from data. “We need to collect data from something, even if it's remote, and then we need to connect it so that the whole data chain actually makes sense,” he asserts. “That's why I decided to create that offering and then that line of business within Atos. We take the data from wherever it is needed, but we start with the end goal, which is let's make money with what we're creating.”

Atos' approach under Langer's guidance has been to develop a platform that – while complex – delivers a comprehensive solution to customers at what the company describes as the Far Edge: edge computing infrastructure deployed in a location farthest from the core data centre and closest to the users. “We've been able to develop the whole platform so that it can be a giant black box that we deliver to the customer,” he explains.

“We've got the right hardware depending on what we want to collect and the whole data platform. We've been partnering with a few companies out there, but I'm pretty happy that now we have an offering that makes sense. That is pretty complex, but at the end of the day, we have a good opportunity now to make money with data which, as we all know, is the new oil.”

Reflecting on his proudest career moment, Langer detailed a project that epitomised his commitment to extracting value from data. He led the development of an AI-driven platform that processed thousands of documents daily, creating a unified database for a client. “It was a pretty complex solution, but at the end of the day, we were able to gather all these documents and make value out of it,” Langer stated, encapsulating the essence of his mission at Atos. “It was really satisfying to see that get live and then see the customer using it.”

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