After narrowly avoiding potential collapse via a €2.9 billion ($3+ billion) debt swap deal with creditors, French IT giant Atos is on its sixth CEO in three years.

CEO Paul Saleh is outbound, to be replaced with company chairman Jean-Pierre Mustier as the individual in charge of navigating the firm through the bailout deal, the firm confirmed to Bloomberg in a statement. A French court has also granted Atos an accelerated safeguard procedure, a recently formed type of restructuring process designed to rescue ailing French firms, the company told Bloomberg.

“It means that Atos is saved,” Mustier said to Bloomberg in an interview. “The financial problems are behind us, we can now focus on the industrial development.”

The deal that saved the firm involves converting around $3.1 billion of loans and bonds (i.e., debt) into equity; about $1.8 billion in new debt; and around $250 million in new equity, Bloomberg previously reported.

Read the rest here.—TM

Did you know generative AI holds serious potential for transforming security ops? Let’s break this down a bit.

To start, organizations need practical guidance to navigate the considerations around data governance, model integrity, and responsible AI adoption. There also needs to be a phased approach to exploring use cases, building proof of concepts, and scaling production deployments.

It’s…a lot. That’s why Amazon Web Services (AWS) put together Generative AI for Security: Harnessing AI for Customer Impact, a free webinar where experts from SANS Institute and AWS provide a strategic roadmap for securely leveraging GenAI.

Watch it here.

When John Lee clocked in at the University of Illinois’s Grainger College of Engineering at 7:30am just a few Fridays ago, the IT manager’s computer wasn’t working—and he was about to learn that approximately 2,500 machines on campus weren’t working either.

After unexpectedly seeing the “blue screen of death,” along with other lifeless computers around the office, Lee drove home to gather his personal machine and his thoughts, communicating with IT leaders about the major disruption. (One email’s subject line demonstrated the task at hand: “All hands on deck.”)

The culprit, a faulty CrowdStrike update causing IT outages at banks, airlines, hospitals, resulted in delayed flights, blank billboards, and canceled surgeries. While chaos reigned across the globe, Lee and his university team executed a plan from their disaster-recovery playbook—a rollout that included prioritizing fixes and strategically distributing helpers across campus to find as many BSODs as possible. The result: a steady, machine-by-machine recovery effort.

“I think, for the most part, this was something that we were ready for,” Lee said.

Read more here.—BH

Line goes up—at least it does if you’re IBM’s software division, which has seen an increase in revenue as AI and cloud capabilities continue to lead the tech industry’s earnings.

“Software grew by 8% with solid growth across hybrid platform[s] and solutions and transaction processing and strong transactional performance,” SVP and CFO James Kavanaugh told investors during an earnings call on July 24.

Doing the math. The company’s Q2 revenue increased 2% year over year, reaching $15.8 billion. IBM has invested heavily in AI and cloud computing in the past year, acquiring companies like Apptio, StreamSets, HashiCorp, and webMethods.

In Q2, the company invested in AI, hybrid cloud, and infrastructure, Kavanaugh told investors.

“Our results this quarter reflect broad-based growth and the strength in the fundamentals of our business with revenue up about $300 million, operating pre-tax income up about $400 million, adjusted EBITDA up more than $350 million and free cash flow up about $500 million,” Kavanaugh said. “For the first half, we generated $4.5 billion of free cash flow, up $1.1 billion year over year.”

Keep reading here.—EH

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