Kathy Gibson reports from CeBit, Hannover – Just under one year after Huawei and Deutsche Telecom announced their intention to build a public cloud in Europe, the system has gone live – and has already signed up its first customer.
The new Open Telekom Cloud is an OpenStack-based infrastructure-as-a-service public cloud based on German data and privacy protection laws that will European enterprises of all sizes with on-demand, pay-as-you-go, secure cloud services to respond to fast changing market conditions.
The cloud offering is based on Huawei’s hardware and software including servers, storage, networking and cloud OS solutions.
“We are adding a new, transformational cloud offering to our existing portfolio of cloud services,” says Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges. “For our business customers in Europe this is an important new service to support their digitisation, and a critical milestone for us in our ambition to be the leading provider of cloud services in Europe.”
Anette Bronder, director: digital division at Deutsche Telecom’s IT arm T-Systems, says the Open Telekom Cloud has taken less than 10 months to bring to fruition.
“We have demonstrated that if you bring complementary strengths together you can create amazing products,” she adds.
The ability to offer a cloud service hosted in Germany is important for the European market, Bronder says. “It’s not just about the go-to-market time, but the ability to be cost-effective. With this products we can offer a solution to the European market that is competitive with the world leaders’ public cloud products – and we are able to beat them.”
Dr Zhang Haibo, president of the Deutsche Telecom customer account at Huawei Enterprise, points to the short time in which the partners have built a viable business.
“Just one year ago we announced our intention to partner,” he says. “In just one year we have gone from an idea to a commercial launch – this is an unbelievable achievement.”
He believes the new offering will resonate with European market needs. “There are a lot of cloud providers in the market, but it’s not so simple to build a solution that is simple, affordable and secure. Our answer is this joint venture between Deutsche Telecoms, a huge ICT provider in Germany, and Huawei, a leader in innovation.”
SAP has signed up as one of the first Open Telekom Cloud users and service providers, offering infrastructure services for SAP applications as well as SAP HANA analysis technology.
According to analyst firm Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), there is significant demand for a Germany-based public cloud solution.
“Access to a scalable, inexpensive public cloud provided by a German service provider from a German data center under German law will be very attractive to many customers in Germany,” says Andreas Zilch, senior vice-president: user business and lead advisor at PAC Germany. “In particular the combination of an inexpensive service and German legal security represents a unique selling point right now.”
