Huawei and Deutsche Telekom launch ‘AWS-beating’ public cloud

CeBIT 2016, Hanover – Just weeks after the two companies showed off their 5G technologies at Mobile World Congress, Huawei and German telco giant Deutsche Telekom have launched a joint public cloud service called Open TelekomCloud.

The deal was first signed last October, and sees a public cloud service built upon Huawei’s Open Cloud OpenStack technology. Deutsche Telekom and its cloud service is the first of many big customer wins Huawei hopes to gain in Western Europe as the company’s IT business ramps up its efforts to boost earnings in the region.

Deutsche Telekom itself is heralding the launch as the “next phase” of the digitisation of Western Europe. The first partner for Deutsche Telekom’s Open TelekomCloud is SAP, with Deutsche Telekom using its T-Systems IT services subsidiary as support in the project.

The launch was welcomed by privacy-conscious German analysts. Andreas Zilch from analyst firm PAC said: “The offer of a scalable, cost-effective public cloud by a German service provider, from a German data centre and under German law, is for many customers in Germany very tempting, especially as the combination of low-cost supply and German legal certainty currently represents a unique selling point.”

In fact, the entire launch seemed to be permeated with a very anti-American theme, with Deutsche Telekom itself claiming it can take up space in a European market that was “hitherto operated mainly by American competitors”.

Deutsche Telekom also claimed that its cloud will be a much cheaper platform than that of one American competitor, in the form of Amazon Web Services – which is this month celebrating its tenth birthday.

“We wanted to find a partner that allows for a price that is significantly below the world market leader”, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Hottges said in a poorly veiled dig.

ChannelBiz sister title TechWeekEurope spoke to Huawei’s IT product line vice president Joy Huang about the Amazon rivalry.

“We offer innovative services here,” Huang said. “Also, compared to Amazon, the local services we have are much better. Especially for big accounts, we have a dedicated team to support customers – not just a web page and a phone number.

“Huawei’s R&D capabilities are also strong. We can develop a very reliable and secure solution, and also we can give a very fast response to customer requirements.”

Huawei reckons that what gives it the edge over competitors like Amazon is that Huawei will put the customer first, and personalise a solution for that customer, rather than the customer having to follow the rules of the cloud provider.

“We have a customer-centric culture. We believe we meet the customer requirements, and we pay a lot of attention to them,” said Huang.

The Open TelekomCloud is based out of what Deutsche Telekom called “Europe’s most modern data centre” in Biere, Saxony-Anhalt, with the company looking to double its sales in the cloud for business customers by the end of 2018. The processed data is subject to strict German privacy rules, with Huawei claiming it will have no access to data stored by Deutsche Telekom.