17. 8. 2023

Older generations will remember this. Long queues at the border, occasional butterflies in your stomach when the officer spends too long checking your documents. With the Czech Republic's accession to the European Union, checks at the borders of the member states have been abolished. This does not mean that borders are not protected. On the contrary. The Schengen Information System (SIS), for example, has been in operation for years, and in the last few weeks a new generation of SIS has been in place, forming one of the virtual shields of the Union's external and internal borders. Their defences are becoming more sophisticated, running continuously in the background, and there are already plans to improve them further. Specialists from Aricoma are involved in all this.

26. 7. 2023

When a company implements an information or production system, it knows the expected return and all the future benefits. The finance manager gets better reports, the warehouse manager gets an immediate overview of available items, the accountant gets clearer invoicing documents. It can thus simply calculate the investment. The situation is far more complex as far as cybersecurity and data protection are concerned. Because you're basically "just" paying for everything to work and you don't know much about the background as a whole. That's why many companies say: "it doesn't concern us", "nobody's interested in our data" or "we have something in place, and that's probably enough". And potential gains sell to everyone significantly better than potential losses.

29. 6. 2023

It was already planned five years ago, when the Aricoma brand first appeared on the Czech market: although the individual parts of the largest Czech IT holding operated under their own names, it was clear that they would become even more connected up over time. And that time is now. Instead of Autocont, AEC, Komix, CES EA and other such brands, customers will now only be seeing Aricoma. "Rebranding is the outcome of a process to enable us to really act as one company. We want the market to see us as a single strong brand," says Milan Sameš, CEO of Aricoma.

21. 6. 2023

When experts from Aricoma, a leading Czech cybersecurity firm among others, issued their industry outlook for this year, the message was clear: the number of hacktivist and politically-oriented cyberattacks will continue to rise. Why is this happening? Who are the people behind the attacks? And most importantly, how to resist their efforts? Maroš Barabas (MB) and Filip Zvařič (FZ) answer all this in our interview. And they point out that we often misunderstand what motivates attackers

3. 5. 2023

There is only one country in the world that has decided to pay its own professional cycling team to conduct a targeted advertising campaign at one of the most watched sporting events on the planet. Yet Israel knew exactly what it was doing. This is because the phrase "Israel Start-up Nation", the banner under which the team has ridden the Tour de France since 2020, has managed to burn the following simple idea into the minds of fans from 190 countries around the world: Israel is all about start-ups.

5. 4. 2023

When, early this year, a British commission definitively confirmed that the KKCG Group would be allowed to take over the operator of the British National Lottery – a traditional company in what is traditionally an extremely conservative country – this was also definitive confirmation, as it were, that Czech business had managed to break out of its stereotype as a developing economy from the East and could now rank alongside the best players on the European and global scene.

5. 4. 2023

In mid-2021, the Aricoma, at that time still under the banner of its subsidiary AUTOCONT, announced that it had succeeded in a tender for the European Commission and would be supplying technology and consulting services for data centres in more than fifty European institutions - including, for example, the European Parliament, Europol, Frontex, the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Commission itself. This would all run to tens of millions of euros over the course of four years. The figures themselves tell an extraordinary tale, but the story behind them is even more interesting. Expect lockdown, closed borders, chip shortage, mistrust of the Czechs, goings-on behind the scenes in Brussels, and also a simple desire to give things a try. This is all described very openly by Jaromír Babinec, Aricoma director for mergers, acquisitions and strategy.

16. 2. 2023

This is not, nor will it be an easy time, but those who are well placed and confident in their product should not find it too difficult. Milan Sameš, the head of the largest IT holding in Central Europe, looks to the new year and beyond with this hope. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian attack on Ukraine, he sees a partial shift away from globalising tendencies and hopes that Aricoma will benefit from this. In what sense, exactly? 

It might not even occur to you these days, but the Covid pandemic has helped make a number of technological solutions a common part of our lives. Online video calls, the ability to collectively manage files remotely, plus lots of other specific tools for various fields. Yet the one place that progress does not seem to have reached is Czech state administration. There is far more talk about digital transformation than there is action. How come? This is precisely what Milan Sameš, CEO of Aricoma, the largest IT player on the Czech market and central Europe region, ponders in this interview. According to him, digital transformation is merely a consequence. First of all, we need to see some major legislative changes and a shift in how we think.