Atlantide is a medium size company specialised in high technologies, which celebrates its 15th birthday in 1999. Our team of 75 consultants, most of them being engineers, is based in Brest and Rennes. Since 1995, Atlantide is part of the Altran Group, the European leader in the field of high technologies consulting.

Our sphere of activity is completely focussed on Europe where we work for significant actors of Industry and Services. We also contribute to the local technological development of Brittany and collaborate with the major research organisations.

Atlantide is principally involved in two sectors:

• New information and communication technologies:
  The development of the technologies and tomor-row services are the core of Atlantide know-how: electronic publishing, Internet, Intranet, digital televi-sion, telecommunications, high speed networks.
  
  
• Sea sciences and technologies:
  Atlantide took advantage of the proximity of the sea and the local research entities specialised in maritime environment to develop its expertise: underwater acoustics, oceanography, instrumentation and geophysics.

Our approach of the technologies enables us to participate in the European Commission R&D Programmes and thus to enlarge our sphere of activities by creating partnerships with other European companies (See below).

In the 4th Framework Programme of the European Community (1994-1998), Atlantide already brought its expertise to several projects:

• CODID - Convergence of DAVIC Internet and DVB This project has been initiated and co-ordinated by Atlantide. Users want seamless integration of serv-ices and application regardless of the specificity of networks, platforms and formats. The project aims to provide a convergence strategy allowing applications and services to be deployed across the targeted infrastructure taking benefit of a set of common tools and interfaces which guarantee true end to end interoperability.
  
  
• DAM - DAVIC Accompanying Measures The main objectives of the DAM project include actions to accompany the work done in the DAVIC Forum to prepare for the commercial introduction of DAVIC services, to increase the European aware-ness about DAVIC specifications, to actively participate from the beginning in the next phases of DAVIC addressing other audio-visual services. Atlantide's task: Development of the Internet-DAVIC bridge ( HTML-MHEG).
  
  
• EIES - European Information Exchange Service between Harbour Areas EIES intends to set up advanced communications between 4 harbour areas (Santander in Spain, Bordeaux and Brest in France, Bremen in Germany), based on the access to an inter-harbour information system providing information on harbour actors and services. Atlantide's tasks: Harbour Intranet; Tele-expertise in the field of naval maintenance and repairing; Collaborative work.
  
  
• TERA - Techno-Economic Results from ACTS TERA aims mainly to support the deployment guidelines for the introduction of advanced communication services and networks. It performed techno-economic evaluations of the outputs from other ACTS projects and field trials and apply the techno-economic methodology and tool developed in projects TI-TAN(R2087) and OPTIMUM (AC226) that is now widely accepted as the state-of-the-art approach for techno-economic evaluations of multimedia communication services and networks. The wider consensus process supports consolidating the ACTS guidelines and leads to promoting their results in international journals, conferences and through the participation of non-EU Mediterranean countries in the process. The guidelines and results target the ACTS community, network and service providers, equipment suppliers, public authorities and regulatory bodies. They clarify the impact of key cost elements, revenues and the broadband upgrade economics., the guidelines also address the risks related to the introduction of new services and advanced networks in a competitive market taking into account the different regulatory environments and boundary conditions such as Universal Service Obligation. In the same way, Atlantide took part in the ISIS programme (Information Society Initiative in Stan-dardisation) which is a Market-Industry oriented programme.
  
  
• MARS Multimedia Access Relying on Standards This project has been performed on Atlantide's initiative and co-ordination. The DAVIC forum has de-livered system specifications supporting "edutainment" applications (especially Video On Demand) targeted to the general public using a TV and a Set-Top Unit as a terminal. The MARS project aims at widening the scope of DAVIC by extending its specifications according to the needs of business applications for the SOHO (Small office/Home office users) domain in which the regular terminal is a mul-timedia PC. MARS is a validation project which includes a field trial.
  
  
• TV Anytime Atlantide took the initiative for this project and co-ordinates it. The project's main objectives are to ease the development of the digital TV market in validating a standardised multimedia home platform featuring local storage; and to enhance the usability (Quality of Use) and performance of digital TV systems in developing a set of downloadable applications (applets) providing the consumers with a user friendly Anytime TV access.

After its experience of co-ordination and participation in the European Programmes, Atlantide became naturally integrated into the 5th Framework Programme of the European Community for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration Activities.