With Plans to Double Business Cloud Revenue by 2018, Deutsche Telekom Extends Huawei Partnership

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

German telecommunications provider Deutsche Telekom is eyeing partnerships to help the company double its cloud revenue with business customers by 2018.

On Monday, Deutsche Telekom announced the extension of its existing partnership with Huawei, improving its hardware and solutions expertise as part of a broader effort to step up cloud activities across the company and compete with Google and AWS.

The companies announced their initial cooperation, involving private cloud services, atCeBIT in March. This extended agreement combines “know-how and cutting-edge technology in the public cloud area,” Haibo Zhang, president of Huawei Deutsche Telekom Key Account Department said.

“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,” Dr. Ferri Abolhassan, Head of the IT Division at T-Systems, the business customer division of Deutsche Telekom said. “Last year, revenue from cloud solutions, in particular in the highly secure private cloud, increased by double-figure percentage points at T-Systems alone. 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.”

Deutsche Telekom’s T-Systems currently has more than 2.6 million SAP users in the cloud. Its European cloud services are offered from data centers in Germany to comply with the country’s data protection laws, which impose strict controls on geographical location of stored data.

With major growth plans in the pipeline for T-Systems, it is no surprise that Deutsche Telekom shot down rumors that it would sell the subsidiary. According to Telecompaper, T-Systems CEO Richard Clemens told German newspaper Handelsblattthat it would continue with a restructure and previously announced job losses.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/with-plans-to-double-business-cloud-revenue-by-2018-deutsche-telekom-extends-huawei-partnership