Atos buys US data science consultancy Miner & Kasch

Atos has purchased Miner & Kasch, an American data science consulting firm with a team of around 30 consultants and data scientists. The deal comes five months after Atos beefed up its US presence with the acquisition of Maven Wave. 

The move bolsters the big data and artificial intelligence consulting practice of the French-origin IT services firm, known as Atos zData. This group was formed in 2017 after Atos acquired zData, and with the addition of Miner & Kasch it now counts over 100 consultants dedicated to the field. 

Miner & Kasch was founded by Donald Miner and Niels Kasch in 2015 and offers data science consulting and big data platform architecture to clients across industries, including healthcare, financial services and energy. The firm has full-stack expertise in big data technology platforms such as Hadoop, Spark and Cassandra, and supports clients across advisory, product development and professional training.

The move comes at a time of rapid growth for artificial intelligence services, with a recent report finding that data science is the fastest growing segment within the consulting industry globally. The opportunity is being spotted by larger consulting firms, including the Big Four, Accenture as well as Atos, as they turn to mergers & acquisitions to beef up their practices on top of pushing for organic growth. 

“The acquisition of Miner & Kasch strengthens our digital portfolio to better serve our customers' evolving needs,” said Jerome Sandrini, head of big data and security at Atos in North America.

As it stands, Atos zData has delivered more than 1,000 use cases of artificial intelligence, machine learning and related technologies at more than 150 clients. The unit partners with several large technology vendors, including Amazon AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. 

Sandrini: “Atos’ data science expertise with deep vertical know-how benefits the customer with added technical skills and appropriate digital resources to rapidly develop use cases and to deploy and support data science applications on any environment of their choice.”

Globally, Atos has more than 110,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenues of €12 billion.