OREANDA-NEWS. Deutsche Telekom is keeping its sights set on the European market for cloud services, with the intention of more than doubling the current annual figure of approximately one billion euros of revenue from business customers by the end of 2018. Building on its market position among business customers is an important step for Deutsche Telekom towards becoming the leading telecommunications company in Europe. Business in IT and telecommunications services from the cloud is growing unabatedly and in response, the Group is constantly expanding its cloud ecosystem with technology partners who are in turn market leaders. Deutsche Telekom and Huawei took the opportunity provided by the Huawei Innovation day today to announce the extension of their cloud services cooperation.

"At Deutsche Telekom, we want to grow by more than 20 percent each year in the field of cloud platforms, and to become the leading provider for businesses in Europe," said Dr. Ferri Abolhassan, Head of the IT Division at T-Systems. Last year, revenue from cloud solutions, in particular in the highly secure private cloud, increased by double-figure percentage points at T-Systems alone. The market for services from the public cloud – infrastructure, platforms and applications – that can be accessed through the public Internet promises further growth. In conjunction with partners, Deutsche Telekom plans to pit itself more strongly against the Internet corporations Google and Amazon in future. To achieve this, the departments within Deutsche Telekom's segments are now stepping up their cloud activities across the Group.

"Huawei provides hardware and solutions expertise, while we offer cloud management with the best availability, via the best network," was how Mr. Abolhassan summed up the new cooperation. "In this way, we are securing the best balance of price, service and quality for our customers when migrating their IT to the cloud." Quality in the sense of failsafe services is the decisive purchase criterion for corporate customers, coming even before price, a study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers has revealed. As one of the cloud pioneers, T-Systems has already been providing corporate customers with services from the cloud for ten years. It counts multinational companies such as Shell, Daimler and Thyssen-Krupp among its customers. With more than 2.6 million SAP users in the cloud, today Deutsche Telekom's corporate customer arm is the biggest SAP cloud landscape operator in the world. Cloud services for Europe are provided from data centers in Germany, which means that they are subject to strict German data protection guidelines. "In cloud computing, data center location brings the valuable advantage of security. Our customers and partners place their full trust in Deutsche Telekom in this regard," said Mr. Abolhassan.

Huawei and T-Systems had already announced the expansion of their collaboration in the private cloud field at CeBIT. "We are delighted that we are able to expand our partnership with Deutsche Telekom and its corporate customer arm T-Systems further. After we agreed on our cooperation regarding IT infrastructure and Private Cloud services during CeBIT we are now taking the next step and combining our know-how and cutting-edge technology in the Public Cloud area to ensure that companies of all sizes are provided with the Cloud of their choice," said Haibo Zhang, President of Huawei Deutsche Telekom Key Account Department.

About Deutsche Telekom
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with around 151 million mobile customers, 30 million fixed-network lines and more than 17 million broadband lines (as of December 31, 2014). The Group provides fixed network, mobile communications, Internet and IPTV products and services for consumers and ICT solutions for business customers and corporate customers. Deutsche Telekom is present in more than 50 countries and has approximately 228,000 employees worldwide. The Group generated revenues of EUR 62.7 billion in the 2014 financial year – more than 60 percent of it outside Germany.

About T-Systems
Deutsche Telekom considers the European business customer segment a strategic growth area. Deutsche Telekom offers small, medium-sized and multinational companies ICT solutions for an increasingly complex digital world. In addition to services from the cloud, the range of services is centered around M2M and security solutions, complementary mobile communications and fixed network products, and solutions for virtual collaboration and IT platforms, all of which forms the basis for our customers' digital business models.
With approximately 47,800 employees worldwide, T-Systems generated revenue of around EUR 8,6 billion in the 2014 financial year.