Kathy Gibson reports from Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai – Deutsche Telecom has signed up Huawei as its public cloud computing partner in Europe.
Jorn Kellerman, senior vice-president and T-Systems, explains that the company was looking for a simple, secure and affordable public cloud solution.
Deutsche Telecom is a leading player in the European IT and telecommunications services market, offering broadband access, backbone connectivity and, through T-System, IT services to a number of global clients.
“With this experience we are now expanding into offering even more cloud services and specifically public cloud,” Kellerman says. “This is based on the tradition of our delivering secure reliable IT services to 30% of the Fortune 500 companies. We are now looking to transition these services.”
Explaining the need for a transition to cloud computing, Kellerman points out that industry is seeing massive changes. “For instance, 90% of the data currently in the world was produced in the last two years.
“And the change is not just being seen in the IT industry. Digitalisation will transform a lot of industries – and it is a very aggressive transformation. Just consider the number of market-leading organisations that have disappeared because they were not able to manage the digital transformation.”
A few very relevant trends are worth considering, Kellerman says.
“The first and most obvious is sheer size and volume. China is no longer the largest state in the world: Facebook now has 1,4-billion active users. And there are huge populations on other social media platforms.
“But it’s not have the size of it, there is also the speed of the change. LinkedIn, for example, receives 170 000 new subscriptions every day – that’s two new members every second.
“Translating this into IT means we need to provide a lot of flexibility,” Kellerman adds. “And this is the true challenge for IT.”
Security is another massive consideration, he says, with the number of scope or security breaches having grown in the last couple of years. “So it’s about trust, and about our customers believing in us.”
Overall, Kellerman believes that digitalisation is a reality that needs to be addressed. “It’s not so much about whether change will happen. It has happened and the question is how we will manage it; how will IT respond?”
Deutsche Telecoms’ answer is cloud computing, building on the connectivity services it already offers its customers. “We aim to provide our customers with a platform for digitalisation that is secure, reliable and affordable.”
Which is where the new partnership with Huawei comes in; allowing Deutsche Telecom and its enterprise service provider T-Systems to provide reliable, secure and flexible IT services on an affordable and easy to use public cloud platform from Huawei.
“The combination of the services offered by the two companies is very attractive to our customers,” Kellerman says.