- Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft are taking Office 365 from the cloud and putting it onto the marketplace for small and medium-sized businesses
- Collaboration in the cloud is the number one trend
- New look, more storage on demand and tablet apps for the Media Center
Deutsche Telekom is further expanding its cloud services with new partnerships for major corporations, small and medium-sized businesses and retail customers. The collaborations with partners such as Box and Microsoft are an important part of this process. Deutsche Telekom is offering Box Business, the leading solution for collaboration across teams, over its marketplace for small and medium-sized businesses. It will also soon offer Microsoft Office 365. This allows employees to work together simply and securely using different devices such as PCs and smartphones. They save their data in the cloud and thereby have access to their e-mails, documents and calendars at any time and in any place, as well as being able to start a Web conference with a single mouse-click. “Secure cloud solutions are a significant part of our Group strategy for more growth,” says Dirk Backofen, who is the person responsible for Deutsche Telekom’s cloud business. “When it comes to the cloud, there’s a clear trend: After the initial tendency to use the cloud purely for storing data, things are now moving towards collaboration. The cloud brings people together,” he says. The advantage for customers is that Deutsche Telekom offers them a complete end-to-end cloud service and provides everything from a single source: Bandwidth, storage space and processing capacity, applications, expertise, independence from operating systems and high security. Cloud services are an important building block, from which Deutsche Telekom will generate revenues in new areas over the coming years. Business Marketplace Small and medium-sized companies have benefitted from the Business Marketplace since the middle of the year. 7,500 customers have already registered themselves on the Deutsche Telekom platform, where they can access cloud services such as accounting, storage space or video conferencing easily, cost-effectively and without additional IT resources. More than 20 solutions are already available. “We plan to have 40 offers available for small and medium-sized companies by the next CeBIT trade fair. It’s all about offering the customer a range of truly qualified and well-tested products,” explains Backofen. “iMeet has been the most successful product so far. It’s an online meeting room in the cloud where up to 15 employees can meet virtually to work as if they were sat in the same office,” he says. Deutsche Telekom is planning to make the Marketplace available in further markets, too. Successful partner concept Deutsche Telekom is also focusing its cloud services in the Marketplace on collaboration with partners. By leveraging partnerships with startups as well as with global corporations, Deutsche Telekom is offering its customers innovative solutions. The business solution from Box, in particular, makes a cloud solution for secure collaboration and sharing documents available to small and medium-sized companies. More than 14 million employees in 140,000 companies worldwide, including 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies, use the solution from Box. Office 365 from Microsoft is now also available from the Business Marketplace. Office 365 offers SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online all from the cloud. Also included are the web versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote. All solutions can be used simply and securely. Each user can use the solutions on all one of his or her devices, whether laptops, tablets or smartphones - completely independent of producers and operating systems. Cloud services are being offered with tariffs starting at 3.25 euros per month and per employee. The benefits for the customer are the same as for all cloud solutions on the Deutsche Telekom Marketplace: Clearly predictable monthly costs without additional infrastructure costs. “Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft have reached a global agreement on the marketing of cloud solutions for small and medium-sized companies,” says Backofen. “The market launch in Germany is just the beginning, and we will be working together in further markets from 2013 onwards.” "The expansion of our collaboration with Deutsche Telekom is an important step towards strengthening the success of Office 365," explained Arnd Hungerberg, Client Director at Microsoft and responsible for global partner business with Deutsche Telekom. "Customers can now get hold of the best Office products in a single bundle from Telekom and test them at no cost. What is more, Office 365 is billed on the customer's invoice from Telekom. This means they have a better overview of monthly costs and business customers benefit from more planning certainty." Corporate customers rely on cloud-based collaboration When it comes to highly-secure cloud solutions for corporate customers, Deutsche Telekom is currently the world’s biggest provider of services for collaboration in the so-called private cloud. Around 300,000 users already communicate and share using Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync in the cloud, while also working on documents together there. At the energy company BP, over 83,000 employees from around the globe can access the communication services they need at anytime, in any place with their mobile end-devices or over landline connections. In addition to this, T-Systems, the Deutsche Telekom company for corporate customers, has recorded consistent demand for cloud-based SAP solutions. This trend has been confirmed by a survey by the industry association Bitkom, in which 66 percent of the firms questioned named cloud computing as the most important information and communications technology. In order to be able to meet the growing demand for cloud solutions, Deutsche Telekom recently laid the foundations on which it is going to build the biggest data center in Germany. The site in Biere, Saxony-Anhalt, has been designed as a high-security data center and will become Deutsche Telekom’s 90th data center worldwide. The secure home for all personal data Deutsche Telekom has also updated and extended its range of cloud products for retail customers in 2012. All Deutsche Telekom customers can select the various cloud options that meet their needs using “Mail & Cloud”. Just as before, 25 gigabits are available for all Media Center users, free of charge. There are also options available for 50 or 100 gigabits of memory. Automatic smartphone synchronization ensures that all data is available securely and professionally on all devices. There are also new apps for iOS and Android that have been optimized for use on smartphones and tablets, and which provide secure access to data when using mobile devices. Moreover, Deutsche Telekom has included integrated music services from the cloud in its product range since October. As a result of the partnership with Spotify, the first ever mobile communications tariff with an integrated Spotify premium music flat rate has now been made available. It offers access to more than 18 million songs. Deutsche Telekom customers can add the music streaming option to many existing mobile communications and fixed-line tariffs for 9.95 euros.
About Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom is one of the world’s leading integrated telecommunications companies with more than 131 million mobile customers, 33 million fixed-network lines and over 17 million broadband lines (as of September 30, 2012). The Group provides products and services for the fixed network, mobile communications, the Internet and IPTV for consumers, and ICT solutions for business customers and corporate customers. Deutsche Telekom is present in around 50 countries and has over 230,000 employees worldwide. The Group generated revenues of EUR 58.7 billion in the 2011 financial year – more than half of it outside Germany (as of December 31, 2011).