End-to-end service from the partner cosmos

Michael Müller-Berg, Head of Partner Management Business Customers at Telekom Deutschland, explains why these are so important today in an interview with E-3 Editor-in-Chief Peter Färbinger.

Mr. Müller-Berg, all major ICT companies maintain numerous partnerships. Do only the partners benefit here - or does the customer also gain something from it?

Michael Müller-Berg: For business customers, partnerships are more important than ever because digitization is fundamentally changing previously familiar value chains and thus also ICT projects.

In the past, the degree of complexity of ICT solutions was much lower. Those who implemented SAP worked with a regional mid-sized SAP system house or a larger IT service provider such as T-Systems.

The requirement was primarily proof of SAP software competence. As a rule, SAP was installed and operated on-premises or in an external data center - that was it in the majority of projects.

For all other IT solutions or for WAN and LAN, the companies worked with other IT and TC providers.

What is different today?

Müller-Berg: The fact that companies are opting for SAP on Azure shows what has changed. In addition to SAP, the ICT service provider must also have expertise in Azure.

Otherwise, the customer would need two service providers at this point: one for the SAP part and one for the Microsoft part. However, if a service provider has teams of experts certified by SAP and Microsoft, customers have much less to do with coordinating and harmonizing these two worlds.

But digitization is turning everything upside down. There are even more players in the game. So what's the point of partnering with individual companies?

Müller-Berg: Those who approach digitization in the right, future-oriented way think less in terms of individual solutions such as SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce or Oracle. All business-critical applications are becoming increasingly interdependent.

If you want to network your machines or evaluate data from marketing and sales using AI solutions, you need more than SAP and Azure. IoT is about networks like 5G, for example.

To bring these components together in a market-driven and timely manner, companies need to coordinate a variety of providers with different levels of service depth.

A time-consuming task for which they need a wide range of skills that are increasingly difficult to obtain in-house.

And Telekom can cover these different trades via partners?

Müller-Berg: Our business customer partner ecosystem has around 5500 partners. This enables us to cover the required diversity - definitely a unique selling point in the market. And the network issue, which has taken on a whole new and important significance as a result of cloud computing, is something we ourselves are putting on the line.

If you don't have a modern, high-performance and future-oriented corporate network, you won't get the cloud on the road properly either. Especially when it comes to real-time data exchange or business-critical applications - of which SAP is most definitely one.

Which partner programs do you mean specifically?

Müller-Berg: From the perspective of SME business customers, our partnerships with regional IT service providers offer important added value. For SMEs, they are trusted partners because they are directly on site with expertise.

However, business is also gradually changing for these regional IT service providers. Their customers are increasingly moving to the cloud. The regional data center, where business customers' IT is still often operated, is losing importance.

SME service providers are therefore increasingly looking for partners like Telekom with whom they can expand their service portfolio and gain reach. This means a win-win-win effect: the regional IT service providers can offer their customers more services.

We can bring our network and cloud competencies to the midmarket. And customers get end-to-end solutions from a single source.

Back to Telekom's partnerships with SAP and Microsoft. Here, Telekom is one partner among many.

Müller-Berg: The partnerships go well beyond the classic sales partnership. For SAP, we are one of the strategic partners in the areas of Global Services, SAP Outsourcing and Cloud. We often find out earlier than other market players what is going to change at SAP.

And as one of the few strategic partners of Microsoft, we offer public cloud services in several fields: SAP applications, managed services based on Azure and Microsoft 365, AI and IoT solutions.

Telekom is a Microsoft-certified Gold Partner and offers multi- and hybrid cloud solutions in the respective areas. So if you decide on "SAP on Azure" at Telekom, you are in good hands with us and our partners.

Thank you for the interview.