OREANDA-NEWS. Union Investment has reached a comprehensive service contract with T-Systems. The order, worth well into the hundreds of millions of euros, includes the transfer of classic IT systems into the secure German cloud, subject to strict German data protection regulations. T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom's business customer arm, is accountable to the asset manager for consistent IT infrastructure, integration into the existing system landscape and operation of the applications. The contract has a term of seven years.

"We have put together a package of computing, SAP and web services, operation of applications and development projects to get all of our service needs from one source and reduce complexity", explains Dr. Andreas Zubrod, member of the Union Investment Management Board. "With our shift to the cloud we will have access to needs-based IT and thus considerably lower our costs."

The agreement with Union Investment is a continuation of T-Systems' success story of providing cloud services for customers across various industries. Shortly before, Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) had entrusted T-Systems with the task of gradually migrating their conventional data center and infrastructure services as well as databases, applications and middleware to the cloud. Likewise, Swiss-based aviation services provider Jet Aviation and elevator and escalator manufacturer KONE have also recently outsourced their SAP services to T Systems' cloud-based platform.

Union Investment is an asset management company owned by "FinanzGruppe", a cooperative finance group in Germany. Union Asset Management Holding, headquartered in Frankfurt, leads the association of individual asset management companies. Its shareholders are institutes within the cooperative banking group. The main shareholders include DZ BANK AG, Frankfurt am Main, and WGZ BANK AG, D?sseldorf. Alongside other specialized institutes, around 1,000 cooperative banks and other credit unions belong to the cooperative finance group. With more than 13,000 offices in Germany, they represent one of the largest national networks in Europe.

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.

Deutsche Telekom considers the European business customer segment a strategic growth area. It 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 centers around M2M, security solutions, complementary mobile communications and fixed-network products, and solutions for virtual collaboration and IT platforms, all of which form the basis for our customers' digital business models. The corporate customers unit (T-Systems) and its 47,800 employees around the world generated revenue of around 8.6 billion euros in the 2014 financial year.