Paving the Way for a Digital World

Anette Bronder, director of the digital division at T-Systems International, spoke about Deutsche Telekom T-Systems' digital journey during this Huawei Connect 2016 address in Shanghai this past summer.

First of all, I need to say, I am deeply impressed. When I look at the scale of the venue and this event, I think it really deserves to shape the future world of digitization. You need to think big. When I look at this arena, I think you have demonstrated that, Huawei. Congratulations to this event. It is my pleasure to be here.

So, for the next few minutes, I want to share with you some perspectives from Deutsche Telekom, from Europe, but also from our strategic partnership with Huawei: How we see the world of making things happen. How we are a pathfinder into the area of public cloud. So with that please allow me to start with a short reflection. Please forgive me, as I am a European, I'd like to give you our interpretation of what we think what is actually going on in Europe. And let me start with a statement: This continent slept through the first phase of digitization. To put it a little bit clearer, some people say that in Europe we lost the first half of digitization. We talked about it; we discussed it. But a few years ago we lost the momentum to make it happen. But the good thing is, Europe is catching up. And we have never faced such disruptive momentum in peacetime Europe as we have been dealing with over the last years.

You the customers are no longer happy with pilots. You are not any longer happy with nice showcases. You are asking us to give you the right tools, the right products, the right end-to-end services for the journey you will need to make happen for your customers. This is what we are seeing in Europe. And if I look at small and medium enterprises, which have a lot of potential, in Europe and especially in Germany, they are demanding that. They are not open to spending a lot of money on testing things, on inventing things. They want it plug-and-play. They want to have it running. They want to have someone by their side that they can use to teach them, to educate them; sometimes just to provide them what they need, at the highest level of quality, secure and simple.

What kind of roles are we playing as Deutsche Telekom AG (NYSE: DT) T-Systems in that game? Let's have look at that. We decided two years ago that we also wanted to be one of the digital leaders of the future, who are serving customers from an end-to-end perspective; and who are able to shape the cloud world, the IoT world and the big data world for customers. I can tell you this has been one of the biggest transformations for our company. Two years ago we were one of the first telecom providers to establish a digital division, which is a dedicated business unit where we have brought together all the strengths we have at Deutsche Telekom for digital services and products.

It is not always an easy thing for a huge oil tanker like us to maintain our strengths, and at the same time, to start new things from scratch. At Stanford University in the US, they call the old economy blue, and they call the startup scene, the new economy, green. They are discussing: How can you grow in green if you are dark blue? How can you manage that at the right speed, with the right scalability, with the right services for your customers, and not lose the momentum of the market. So it's also been one of the biggest transformations for us in Deutsche Telekom, and we think we have a right to play. We are one of the strongest telecom providers in Europe, we have strong assets from the connectivity perspectives in the US, and we have T-Systems International with IT capabilities plus systems integration. And by the way, this digital world is not a plug-and-play world. You the customers also need this stuff integrated, harmonized, and orchestrated. So we have strengths in connectivity, and we have strengths in IT, and on top of that, we put in the new skills. This also means bringing new people into the company, educating people and coming from a totally different perspective when we are creating, designing and developing new products and services.