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Bonn / Redmond (dpa) - Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft have announced an expansion of their partnership in order to advance the digitization of large customers and medium-sized companies.
Both companies announced this on Thursday.
Above all, the Azure cloud solution and the Microsoft 365 software and service package will be used.
At the same time, the two groups want to jointly target the education market in order to provide the Microsoft Teams communication platform and other group services in schools and other educational institutions.
"This partnership will enable us to improve the services for our customers," said T-Systems boss Adel Al-Saleh.
"We will also support each other with digitization and network expansion."
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The new partnership builds on an agreement that T-Systems and Microsoft concluded at the Hanover Fair in 2018.
While at that time it was mainly about the networking of devices in the Internet of Things, the new partnership is broader.
On the one hand, the cooperation includes not just T-Systems, but Deutsche Telekom as a whole.
In addition, cloud computing is now playing a bigger role.
"The partnership is now much more strategic than in 2018," said Microsoft sales director Jean-Philippe Courtois.
Germany is one of the countries in the world where cloud computing is growing the fastest.
Al-Saleh said many customers were very traditional and conservative.
But the trend is also recognized by this group.
“We want to accelerate this move to the cloud.
The question no longer arises as to whether the switch to the cloud is right, but only how quickly it can be implemented. "
Telekom will not only offer Microsoft solutions exclusively.
«We have a preferred partnership with Microsoft.
But if the customer pursues a multi-cloud strategy and relies on different providers, we will also support them. "
The T-System boss emphasized that Deutsche Telekom itself is also moving more and more towards the public cloud with its own IT.
There are certain tasks that the company prefers to do in its own Open Telekom Cloud.
"But there is no question that we are going in the direction of the public cloud."
In this context, Al-Saleh referred to Deutsche Telekom's efforts to further improve the security of Microsoft's public cloud.
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The partnership should also enable a common appearance on the education market.
The Corona crisis revealed deficiencies in the digital equipment of schools in Germany and other countries, said Microsoft manager Courtois.
With the help of Microsoft Teams and other solutions from his company, millions of schoolchildren and teachers around the world have been enabled to have a meaningful everyday school life even during the pandemic.
In its attempt to establish Microsoft Teams as a video and communication platform at schools in Germany, the US group has met with some major reservations.
The Berlin data protection officer Maja Smoltczyk has specifically spoken out against the use of teams in the capital's schools.
She argues that corporations like Google and Microsoft reserve the right to use the data for their own purposes.
Most recently, the data protection officer warned the Brodowin primary school in Berlin-Lichtenberg because Microsoft Teams was used there.
In other federal states such as Baden-Württemberg, however, the state governments are planning to purchase a Microsoft solution.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 201210-99-637678 / 2