Category Archives: Deutsche Telekom

5G, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, IoT, KDDI, Networks, News & Analysis, SK Telecom

Ericsson claims a world first with transcontinental 5G trial

Ericsson, Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom have announced a partnership to deploy world’s first transcontinental 5G trial network, reports Telecoms.com.

The objective of the agreement will be to provide optimized end-user experiences by providing consistent quality of services and roaming experiences for advanced 5G use cases with enhanced global reach. Ericsson will act as the sole supplier to the project, which will include technologies such as NFV, software defined infrastructure, distributed cloud, and network slicing.

Last October, Ericsson and SK Telecom conducted a successful demonstration of network slicing technology, which featured the creation of virtual network slices optimized for services including super multi-view and augmented reality/virtual reality, Internet of Things offerings and enterprise solutions.

“5G is very different from its predecessors in that the system is built as a platform to provide tailored services optimized for individual customer’s needs, at a global scale,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, CTO at SK Telecom. “Through this three-party collaboration, we will be able to better understand and build a 5G system that can provide consistent and enhanced user experience across the globe.”

Alongside the announcement, Ericsson and SK Telecom also successfully completed a demonstration of 5G software-defined telecommunications infrastructure, using the vendors Hyperscale Datacenter System (HDS) 8000 solution. The pair claims this is a world-first and will enable dynamic composition of network components to meet scale requirements of 5G services.

Software-defined telecommunications infrastructure is one of the enablers of network slicing, which will allow operators to create individual virtualized environments which are optimized for specific users. The demonstration itself focused on two use cases; ultra-micro-network end-to-end (E2E) slicing for personalized services, and ultra-large-network E2E slicing for high-capacity processing.

“SDTI is an innovative technology that enhances network efficiency by flexibly constructing hardware components to satisfy the infrastructure performance requirements of diverse 5G services,” said Park Jin-hyo, Head of Network Technology R&D Center at SK Telecom.

Finally, Ericsson has announced another partnership with Japanese telco KDDI with the ambition of delivering IoT on a global scale and providing enhanced connectivity services to KDDI customers.

The partnership will focus on Ericsson’s cloud-based IoT platform to deliver services such as IoT connectivity management, subscription management, network connectivity administration and flexible billing services. The pair claims the new proposition will enable KDDI’s customers to deploy, manage and scale IoT connected devices and applications globally.

IoT represents a significant opportunity for enterprise customers and operators alike, as it significantly increases the amount of data available and also access points to customers worldwide. Research firm Statista estimates the number of devices worldwide could exceed 50 billion, though the definition of what a connected device is or what an IoT connected device is varies.

“KDDI has for a long time been committed to building the communication environment to connect with world operators in order to support the global businesses of our customers,” said Keiichi Mori, GM of KDDI’s IoT Business Development Division. “We believe that by adopting DCP, we will be able to leverage Ericsson’s connection with world carriers and furthermore promote our unified service deployment globally to customers as they start worldwide IoT deployments.”

data protection, Data Trustee, Deutsche Telekom, Enterprise IT, enterprise mobility, News & Analysis

DT keeps data out of US reach with new mobility platform

UnternehmerinA Deutsche Telekom subsidiary has announced a new cloud-based Enterprise Mobility Management offering called Hosted MDM Basic, which has been built on MobileIron’s Cloud platform.

The offering will be hosted in Deutsche Telekom data centres located in Germany, using MobileIron’s platform, will create a Data Trustee proposition, which complies with German data protection rules, generally considered to be the strictest throughout the EU. The Data Trustee model was coined during the Microsoft’s dispute with the US government over access of data held by the company in its Dublin data centre.

Deutsche Telekom acted as a ‘trustee’ of the data, meaning employees could not access the data without consent from the Telco. The arrangement aims to put the data of Microsoft’s European customers outside the reach of the US government and its intelligence agencies.

The on-going discussion surrounding data transmission, access and residency has been a challenging area, following the European Court of Justice’s decision to dismiss the Safe Harbour agreement. The subsequent proposition, US-EU Privacy Shield, has also been dismissed by a number of individuals throughout the EU, as it apparently still does not offer the required levels of security and assurance. The Data Trustee model is seemingly a means for companies taking data protection into their own hands, as they do not appear to be willing to wait for assurances from the US.

“Mobile technology gives us the ability to get data and act on it more quickly so organizations that are serious about using mobile technologies can dramatically increase their velocity,” said Barry Mainz, CEO at MobileIron. “Our integration with Telekom Deutschland combines MobileIron’s industry-leading mobile security platform with Telekom Deutschland’s data trustee capabilities.”

The company claims the offering provides simplified security and control of Android, iOS and Windows devices, but also manages mobile apps, content, and devices, automatically enforce policies, and retire mobile devices when they are lost or when an employee leaves the company.

Deutsche Telekom, Enterprise IT, Huawei, News & Analysis, Public Cloud

Deutsche Telekom aims to increase European market share with Open Telekom Cloud launch

DTDeutsche Telekom has launched Open Telekom Cloud, a new public cloud platform with Huawei as the hardware and software solution provider, in an effort to increase its market share in the European public cloud segment.

The service will offer European enterprises on-demand, pay-as-you-go cloud services via an OpenStack-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution operated by T-Systems. The company ambition is to accelerate its position in the market segment, which is currently dominated by US players.

“We are adding a new, transformational cloud offering to our existing portfolio of cloud services,” said Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges at CeBIT in Hanover. “For our business customers in Europe this is an important new service to support their digitization, and a critical milestone for us in our ambition to be the leading provider of cloud services in Europe.”

“More and more customers are discovering the advantages of the public cloud. But they want a European alternative,” said Anette Bronder, Head of the T-Systems Digital Division. The move aims to capitalize on recent industry concerns over where data is being stored, as European customers are increasingly demanding that their data remain within the boundaries of the EU.

Located in Biere, Saxony-Anhalt, any data will be subject to German data protection policy, recognized as one of the most stringent globally. “Access to a scalable, inexpensive public cloud provided by a German service provider from a German data centre under German law will be very attractive to many customers in Germany” said Andreas Zilch, SVP at analyst firm Pierre Audoin Consultants. “The combination of a competitive service and German legal security represents a unique selling point right now.”

Deutsche Telekom and its subsidiary T-Systems have been offering cloud solutions since 2005. The data centre in Biere, and its twin in Madgeburg, hosts almost all of the company’s ecosystem partners, which includes the likes of Microsoft, SAP, Cisco, Salesforce, VMWare, Huawei, Oracle, SugarCRM, and Informatica.

The announcement also strengthens Huawei’s position in the European market, a long-term ambition for the Chinese tech giant. Huawei will provide hardware and software solutions, including servers, storage, networking and Cloud OS, while also the technical support for the public cloud services.

“The strategic partnership allows each party to fully play to their strengths, providing enterprises and the industry with various innovative public cloud services that are beyond those provided by over-the-top content players,” said Huawei Rotating CEO Eric Xu “At Huawei, we are confident that, with esteemed partners like Deutsche Telekom, we can turn Open Telekom Cloud into the standard of public cloud services for the industry at large.”

 

Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Infrastructure as a Service, News & Analysis

Deutsche Telekom launches pan-European public cloud on Cisco platform

T-Mobile Computing cloudDeutsche Telekom has announced the start of a new pan-European public cloud service aimed at businesses of all sizes. The debut offering will be DSI Intercloud, run by T-Systems, which will offer Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to businesses across Europe. In the first half of 2016, software and platforms as a service deals (SaaS and PaaS) will be launched.

The service, built on a Cisco platform by T-Systems, the business division of Deutsche Telekom, will run from German data centres and be subject to Germany’s data sovereignty regulations.

The pay-as-you-go cloud services can be ordered through Telekom’s new cloud portal, with no minimum purchase requirements and contract periods. Prices start at €0.05 per hour for computing resources and storage at €0.02 per gigabyte. Deutsche Telekom said it hopes to create the foundation for a secure European Internet of Things with high availability and scalability for real time analytics.

Data security company Covata test piloted the platform and will be the first customer to use the DSI Intercloud infrastructure service. Another beta tester was communications company Unify, which used it to investigate the viability of open source cloud platforms running from German data centres.

The new DSI Intercloud marks the latest chapter in the Cisco Intercloud initiative. In June BCN reported how Cisco had bolstered the Intercloud, which it launched in 2014, with 35 partnerships as it aimed to simplify hybrid clouds. Cisco and Deutsche Telekom say they will focus on delivering high availability and scalability for real-time analytics at the edge of the networks, in order to cater for IoT experiences. Edge of networking big data analytics is to become a key a concept in the IoT, BCN reported in December. Last week Hewlett Packard enterprises (HPE) revealed how it is helping IoT system users to decentralised all their processing jobs and devolve decision making to local areas. The rationale is to keep masses of data off the networks and deal with it locally.

Deutsche Telekom said the Cisco partnership is an important building block in expanding its cloud business and aims to at least double its cloud revenue by the end of 2018. In fiscal year 2014, net sales of cloud solutions at T-Systems increased by double figures, mainly in secure private clouds.

Aeris, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Digi International, Fujitsu, IMC, Inmarsat, Intel, Internet of Things, Iridium, KORE, M2M, News & Analysis, Nighthawk Controls, Numerex, ORBCOMM, Rose Schooler, Synapse Wireless, Telecom Italia, Telit, Verizon, Wipro, Wyless

Intel, Wipro join IoT, M2M trade body to boost deployments

Intel and Wipro are joining the IMC

Intel and Wipro are joining the IMC

Intel and Wipro have this week joined the International M2M Council (IMC), a global trade association set up to represent Internet of Things vendors and service providers and boost volume IoT deployments.

The trade body, which does advocates on behalf of IoT vendors and service providers, claims to have over 10,000 members and is on track to grow by another 5,000 by the year’s end. In addition to Intel and Wipro companies on the IMC board of governors include Aeris, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Digi International, Inmarsat, Iridium, KORE, Nighthawk Controls, Numerex, ORBCOMM, Synapse Wireless, Telecom Italia, Telit, Verizon, and Wyless.

“The IMC’s focus on business results suits our role as a provider of end-to-end IoT solutions very well,” said Vijay Anand V.R., practice director, IoT Business, Wipro Digital, who has also joined the IMC Board

“This trade group also has a truly global footprint that fits our business model and aspirations.”

Rose Schooler, vice president of the IoT Strategy Office at Intel, who also sits on the IMC board of governors said: “The IMC is an industry-leading professional organisation that is reaching out to adopters of IoT technology on a broad scale. The organisation is gaining an average of 275 new members per week – members that are developing, buying, and deploying IoT solutions. Clearly, there is a demand in the market to learn more.”

Both Intel and Wipro have accelerated their IoT efforts over the past few months. Earlier this year enterprise vendor Software AG and outsourcing giant Wipro teamed up to offer a platform for streaming analytics generated by Internet of Things sensors and devices.

Intel has also ramped up its collaborations in the space, teaming with Fujitsu in May this year to develop Internet of Things solutions for manufacturing, retail and public sector clients.

AT&T, China Mobile, China Telecom, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Lithium, Networks, News & Analysis, OpenDaylight, OpenFlow, Orange, Sarwar Raza, SDN, T-Mobile, Telefónica I+D, Virtualisation

OpenDaylight launches third open source SDN platform, announces advisory group

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

OpenDaylight has released the latest version of its open source SDN platform and cobbled together an advisory group to improve the feedback loop between deployment and feature evolution

The OpenDaylight project has released the third version of its open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform, Lithium, as the organisation launches an advisory tasked with feeding technical insights learned through deployment back into the developer community.

The OpenDaylight Project is an open source collaboration between many of the industry’s major networking incumbents on the core architectures enabling software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV).

The community is developing an open source SDN architecture and software, the latest release of which has been dubbed Lithium, that supports a wide range of protocols including OpenFlow, the southbound protocol around which most vendors have consolidated.

“End users have already deployed OpenDaylight for a wide variety of use cases from NFV, network on demand, flow programming using OpenFlow and even Internet of Things,” said Neela Jacques, executive director, OpenDaylight.

“Lithium was built to meet the requirements of the wide range of end users embedding OpenDaylight into the heart of their products, services and infrastructures. I expect new and improved capabilities such as service chaining and network virtualization to be quickly picked up by our user base,” Jacques said.

The organisation said Lithium boats a number of improvements over the previous release of its platform, Helium, like increased scalability, native support for OpenStack Neutron, new security, monitoring and automation features, support for more APIs and protocols including Source Group Tag eXchange (SXP), Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP), IoT Data Management (IoTDM), SMNP Plugin, Open Policy Framework (OpFlex) and Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points (CAPWAP).

“We see OpenDaylight as a powerful platform for carrier-grade SDN solutions, which is getting more feature-rich with every release,” said Sarwar Raza, vice president, NFV Product Management, HP and OpenDaylight Project board member. “ConteXtream, now an HP Company, has been active in the OpenDaylight community since its inception and has made significant contributions to Service Function Chaining, an important capability for NFV. We look forward to our continued involvement in the OpenDaylight project to help enable widespread adoption of SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV.”

The move comes the same week the project announced the formation of the OpenDaylight Advisory Group (AG), a group composed mostly of telcos tasked with providing technical input to the OpenDaylight developer community based on deployment experience.

The twelve founding members of the advisory group include researchers and specialists from China Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile, China Mobile, Telefónica I+D, AT&T, Orange, and Comcast.

The organisation said the advisory group was set up to help provide technical and strategic guidance to the steering committee and developer community – in other words, to keep the open source platform from straying from the requirements of those deploying it.

Interestingly, apart from NASDAQ, enterprises seem relatively under-represented on the committee, which could see future iterations of OpenDaylight focus more heavily on those use cases – possibly over others more common in the enterprise.

Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, Huawei, News & Analysis, Salesforce, SAP, T-Systems, Telco Cloud

Deutsche Telekom wants to double cloud revenues by 2018

Deutsche Telekom wants to bolster its cloud business

Deutsche Telekom wants to bolster its cloud business

Deutsche Telekom said this week aims to redouble efforts to beat out big IT incumbents in the increasingly lucrative cloud services segment. Through the telco’s IT-focused subsidiary it intends to double cloud revenues over the next three years.

The company said it wants to start generating upwards of two billion euros annually from cloud services by 2018, double what it says it currently pulls in.

“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 Ferri Abolhassan, head of the IT Division at T-Systems.

Last year revenues from cloud solutions, in particular private cloud services, increased double digits at the firm, Abolhassan explained. But with the battle for cloud revenue heating up with more traditional IT service providers and vendors the company needs to scale up its cloud activities both within and outside T-Systems.

“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,” he said, adding that DT will also continue to try and differentiate on security.

Telco’s haven’t been the natural choice for enterprise IT professionals but over the past few years many like DT have stepped up their cloud strategies, a move which largely sees them both acquiring successful cloud incumbents and integrate them into their own operations – for instance Verizon’s acquisition of Terremark, or CenturyLink’s acquisition of Savvis – and using their existing commercial telecoms and managed services clients as direct channels.

Partnerships are also key in this segment and earlier this year DT announced a flurry of cloud-centric deals with Cisco, Huawei, SAP and Salesforce. That said, the move could be a sign DT will soon ramp up partnerships with other big cloud providers or ISVs – or head down the M&A route.

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Cisco Q3: Enterprise shines while service provider biz struggles

Cisco said it enterprise business is looking strong but service provider segment still sees challenges

Cisco said it enterprise business is looking strong but service provider segment still sees challenges

Cisco reported third quarter 2015 revenues of $12.1bn this week, just over 5 per cent what it raked in during the same quarter last year. In a call with analysts this week Cisco execs said the company sees continued growth in its enterprise segment, but its service provider business continue to struggle.

Revenue for the first nine months of fiscal 2015 was $36.3bn, up from $34.8bn for the first nine months of fiscal 2014.

Kelly Kramer, Cisco executive vice president and chief financial officer said the company saw a good balance across its portfolio, with its enterprise segment looking fairly strong, much like the previous quarter.

UCS revenues for the quarter were $3bn, which is sequentially flat but a 30 per cent year-on-year increase, and the company said its seeing growth in its converged infrastructure offerings (those co-developed with VCE and IBM). Its cloud revenues grew 11 per cent year-on-year, mostly on growth in its conferencing cloud software.

In a call with analysts this week Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers said the company is seeing better performance in its enterprise segment than its server provider business – hindered in part by an industry-wide slowdown in spending seen over the past few quarters now.

“In enterprise, the shift to selling outcomes, not products, is resulting in larger opportunities and dramatic increases in pipeline. In US enterprise, for example, the value of our pipeline of deals over $1 million increased approximately 60 per cent year-over-year, with the average deal size up over 30 per cent,” he said.

“We are managing continued challenges in our service provider business, which declined 7 per cent, as global service provider capex remained under pressure and industry consolidation continues. We believe the organisational changes we have made in our global service provider organisation are working, and we are very focused on growing our share of wallet.”

“We are managing continued challenges in our service provider business, which declined 7%, as global service provider CapEx remained under pressure and industry consolidation continues. We believe the organizational changes we have made in our global service provider organization are working, and we are very focused on growing our share of wallet”

Chambers also said Cisco’s intercloud strategy announced last year will kick into “phase 2” shortly, and while he declined to specifically outline what that entails he did shed some light on the programme’s challenges in its bid get other service providers on board with it.

“The pieces that we were missing was how do you go into this new environment where each of these “public clouds in clouds” are separate? And you have to be on different vendors or different companies’ tech to have the ability to go into it. So what we’re looking at first is an architecture and it cements our relationships in service providers. And then it really comes through to how you monetise it over time.”

“This will just take time to monetize, but the effect we see indirectly is already huge when you talk about a Deutsche Telekom or a Telstra and our relationships with those,” he added.

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Deutsche Telekom announces flurry of cloud partnerships with SAP, Salesforce, Cisco, Huawei

Deutsche Telekom announced a slew of cloud partnerships this week

Deutsche Telekom announced a slew of cloud partnerships this week

Deutsche Telekom announced a number of cloud-focused partnerships with Salesforce, SAP, Huawei and Cisco at CeBIT this week.

T-Systems, the telco’s enterprise-focused subsidiary, worked with Salesforce to develop a Customer Experience platform for the automotive sector, which the companies said would connect dealers, workshops, vehicles and customers more closely via an interactive showroom on customers’ mobile phones.

Additionally, the company said it is working closely with consulting giant Deloitte to advise European clients on how to implement the cloud-based CRM platform.

It is also making SAP SuccessFactors available to corporate customers, and next month the company plans to implement the cloud-based human resources management platform internally to serve the company’s 220,000 employees.

Lastly, the firm announced an update to its September 2014 deal with Cisco to become an Intercloud partner. T-Systems is currently installing Cisco’s OpenStack-based infrastructure in datacentre in Biere, near Magdeburg, and said the first Software-as-a-Service product, a managed hotspot for small and medium-sized business, will be available in the second quarter of 2015.

Cisco is one of a number of DT’s partners when it comes to cloud infrastructure. This week the German telco also signed a global framework agreement with Huawei that will see the latter provide IT infrastructure and private cloud solutions to T-Systems.

The telco is aggressively moving forward with plans to expand its reach in the cloud sector. Ferri Abolhassan, director of the IT division at T-Systems, described the partnerships as “a systematic step on the part of T-Systems to consolidate its technology leadership in all matters cloud in Europe, and to expand globally.”