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NEED FOR NETWORKS 5G QUANTUM LEAP CIO TALK TENGELM

CTO TALK KONEIOT: THE LIFESAVER

Issue 3 / 2017

Without a network, digitization is just the

“telephone game.”

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MORE SPEED, SECURITY, EFFICIENCY, PRODUCTIV-ITY — there’s no end to the digitization tools and methods that help companies do business more efficiently and ef-fectively. Blockchain, mobile payment, predictive mainte-nance – the list goes on and on. Not only do they unlock new business models and improve your ability to service current markets better, but they also provide inroads to entirely new market segments. However, every thought, new idea and process has to pass through a network. And that’s where digitization comes in -- long before the algo-rithms, sensors, actuators, bits and bytes.

Auto makers, for example, now want to be mobility providers -- essentially service companies for mobility. That’s an entirely new way of envisioning their market role and demands a transformation of their business model. Two trends will have a particularly dramatic impact: elec-tric vehicles and autonomous driving. Both depend on ar-tificial intelligence (AI) and smart networks. But for AI to work as a viable technology, it mustn’t be slowed down by the network.

If the battery is the heart of the vehicle, the software is its brain. And the more autonomous the assistance sys-tems or vehicles are, the more intelligence – i.e. learning software – they need. Cars can then interact via sensors in fractions of a millisecond over ultra-fast next-generation networks, enabling a truly automated driving experience. All thanks to 5G, one of the focus topics of this issue.

But who will organize the integration of cloud and edge computing to literally take the necessary computing power (read: latencies) to the streets? Who will provide the data centers that need to offer much higher capacities than today’s worldwide computing hubs? Who will manage the highly scalable cloud platforms and myriad network tech-

Prepared for the ne(x)t generation.

Reinhard Clemens, Member of the Board of Management Deutsche Telekom AG for T-Systems, and CEO of T-Systems.

nologies behind it all? Even as all these trends unfold, the complexity of these systems will skyrocket as distributed technologies spread, cybercrime grows and the Internet of Things swells to accommodate 25 billion devices, ma-chines and sensors by 2020. Clearly, digitization is putting ever-larger demands on networks to be secure, reliable and high-performance. And today’s networks aren’t powerful enough to exhaust digitization’s full potential.

At T-Systems, we believe the answer lies in a highly in-tegrated self-learning system. A system whose underlying network controls all the resources and processes in an intelligent, holistic, highly automated fashion.

In other words: a software-centric model of an intui-tive network of new possibilities.

Best regards,

Reinhard Clemens

EDITORIAL

3

06

06 Digitization’s pack horses NETWORKS. Without networks, ‘digitization’ would just be

another word for ‘stagnation.’ However, to exhaust all the possibilities presented by upcoming IT technologies, the digital transformation will have to extend to mobile devices, landline networks and much more.

12 Rapid ramp-up SMART SD-WAN. With the ngena network alliance,

organizations can get an IP-based worldwide private network that they can essentially control at a keystroke.

14 Ground rules for a new era

INTERVIEW. T-Systems Managing Directors Patrick Molck-Ude and François Fleutiaux on differentiation from the customer’s perspective, the expertise needed for the IoT sector and the ability to easily deliver services across borders.

16 IoT plays guardian angel CONNECTED T-SHIRTS. IoT-enabled equipment that connects

to the cloud can save the lives of people who work in high-risk professions like firefighting.

22 When “real time” keeps its promise ANALYZE IT. Scientists Prof. Christian Wietfeld and

Prof. Michael ten Hompel about the possibilities and opportunities of real time communications, when 5G makes sure that real time “is what it claims to be.”

26 5G quantum leap ILLUSTRATION. Tomorrow’s cellular standard will unsnarl

tomorrow’s network traffic jams in many ways – through speed, latency, availability and resilience.

28 CIO talk with Tengelmann USER EXPERIENCE. Riccardo Sperrle, the retailer’s Group

CIO, on customer intimacy as a key feature of digitization, the impact of network availability on expansions and men who shop on Saturday mornings.

33 May ’18 is coming PRIVACY BY DESIGN. Dr. Thomas Kremer, Member of the

Deutsche Telekom Board of Management, on the EU General Data Protection Regulation coming into force next spring and the best ways to handle personal data in the future.

Building bridges with networks

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About this publicationPublished by:Sven KrügerT-Systems International GmbH Weinsbergstraße 7050823 Köln

Publication Manager:Annette NejedlExecutive Editor:Alice BackesEditor-in-Chief:Thomas van Zütphen(responsible for content)Organization: Anke EchterlingArt Direction: Tobias ZabellLayout: Nora Luther, Claudia KnyeGraphics Manager: Susanne NarjesOperation Manager: Ute Szimm; Stefan M. GlowaFinal Edit: Ursula JungerAuthors of this issue: Eva Book, Sven Hansel, Roger Homrich, Julia Keller, Silke Kilz, Yvonne Nestler, Rainer Schlösser, Anja Steinbuch, Birgit Wölker, Thomas van Zütphen

Publisher:HOFFMANN UND CAMPE XA trademark of Ho�mann und CampeVerlags GmBH, Harvestehuder Weg 42,20149 Hamburg, Tel. (040) 441 88-457,Fax (040) 441 88-236,E-mail: x@hoca.de

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Copyright:© 2017 by T-Systems. Reproductionrequires citation of source and submis-sion of a sample copy. The content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the publisher.

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Questions and suggestions?bestpractice@t-systems.com

47 Going public PUBLIC SECTOR. The Lutheran Church in Bavaria, the

Bavarian state government and TV broadcaster rbb show how the public sector is embracing digitization.

50 One for all CORPORATE SIP INTERNATIONAL. A high-capacity

SIP trunk from T-Systems makes it possible to centralize telephone lines across Europe.

52 Ounce of prevention ERGO. The insurance company is linking smart home

sensors to its Allysca service portal so that automatic notifica-tions can be immediately sent out to minimize the damage inflicted on homes by pipe or equipment failures.

42

34 Digital singularity PIONEER. Kevin Parikh believes technologies should be

integrated as much as possible so that man and machine can converge in a beneficial way.

36 Plato and the Internet ESSAY. Rebecca Newberger on a

philosophical renaissance.

40

Issue 3 / 2017CONTENTS

5

BEST PRACTICES

39 Clean bill of health GESUNDHEIT NORDHESSEN. The hospital operator

once nearly missed the digitization boat. Today, it’s using a private cloud at T-Systems’ Dynamic Healthcare Centers.

40 Powering performance LEAG. The mining and power plant company uses the

ServiceNow platform solution to automatically support its IT processes.

42 CTO talk with KONE GOING UP. Tomio Pihkala, CTO of one of the world’s lar-

gest elevator and escalator makers, on predictive main-tenance for millions of elevators, innovation with a “wow” factor and the role of IoT for the people flow of the future.

Fascinatingly differentWho says time machines aren’t real? Just look at

digitization: it has catapulted us into the future. One of the motors driving this machine are

communication networks. And they shouldn’t be neglected in our drive to modernize.

Alexa can shop online, parking garages can communicate with

cars, and department stores can welcome customers from a

distance – all thanks to networks.

Networks

Foundations of digitization

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Alexa is a real workhorse. She lends a hand wherever she’s needed in the home: doing the shopping, turning on TV bias lighting and re-serving the nearest vehicle through a car shar-ing platform. She’s an inexhaustible font of

knowledge, tells jokes and, best of all, is never grouchy, but always has a sunny disposition. Alexa is popular, too. She works in over eleven million households in the United States alone. How? She’s a computer – albeit an extremely intelli-gent one: a 24/7 virtual assistant.

Though only two years old, Alexa had over 15,000 “skills” by mid-2017 – apps that give her new abilities. If you wish, your digital roommate will remind you to put out the trash for pick-up, update your shopping list or provide a current traffi c report. But Alexa needs the Internet to work her magic. That’s because Alexa lives and thinks in an Amazon data center and connects to her owners over a data network. And she only works properly if the data trav-els so fast that users don’t even notice the delay.

Alexa is a digital assistant – and just one of many new tools that digitization has conjured up out of thin air. “Digiti-zation has created entirely new markets and driven rapid growth in existing ones,” said Prof. Marion A. Weissen-berger-Eibl, Head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) and Professor for Innovation and Technology Management at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. According to analysts, expectations have

peaked for technologies such as machine learning, auton-omous vehicles and connected homes. Virtual reality, for its part, is already tantalizingly close to the productivity stage. Like Alexa, these technologies are all about data – storing, linking and analyzing it. Not to mention transmit-ting it securely and reliably at inconceivably quick speeds. If organizations want to climb onto the digitization train, though, they will have to clear additional hurdles -- includ-ing the need to swiftly roll out suitable network connec-tions. To do that, corporate networks need innovations that can accelerate global data transfer rates to a rapid pace. “We’re standing at the cusp of an entirely new era in net-work technology,” said Patrick Molck-Ude, Director of the Telecommunications Division at T-Systems (see page 14). “We’re moving away from rigid, complex local networks and toward agile, simple, global ones.”

COPY Yvonne Nestler

ILLUSTRATION Matthias Schardt “We’re standing at the cusp of an entirely new era

in network technology.” PATRICK MOLCK-UDE,

Director of TC Division T-Systems

WHO’S AFRAID OF ONLINE GIANTS? One group that has benefi ted from the new era of connect-edness are retailers. E-commerce giants have thrust digital transformation onto the entire industry: from Alibaba to Za-lando. In 2017, ten percent of retail sales currently come from e-commerce; by 2021, the percentage will increase to 15.5, according to eMarketer, a market research outfi t. The engine powering this long-term trend is clear: customers carry around gateways to their favorite store in their pocket or purse. Or they go directly to a virtual assistant and order goods by voice command from their couch.

For retailers, it’s both a challenge and an opportunity. Digital opportunities are wide open for every company. From personalized advertising and freshness sensors for produce to mobile payments. “Could online retailers be more of a blessing than a curse for us?” asked Jens Jän-icke, who runs a grocery store in Adendorf, Lower Saxony, Germany. “Obviously, there’s some risk involved in going digital. But it helps to try things out.”

THE STORE NEXT DOORTo succeed, retailers have to maintain a presence near their customers, who might otherwise end up ordering on-line. One solution: open as many stores as possible. An ex-pansion that dramatically places big demands on the corporate network since each new store needs its own net-work connection. “It used to take up to six months to run lines to new locations,” said Molck-Ude. “Service providers

don’t have dense networks in every corner of the world, after all.” Instead, corporate network operators often had to embark on lengthy negotiations with local partners. And that took time.

To address this bottleneck, T-Systems has rolled out “Smart SD-WAN” (see page 12). This latest enterprise net-work solution from the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary pig-gybacks on the global infrastructure of the ngena alliance, which interconnects its partners’ local networks to provide international lines and network services. No coordination required. Best of all, the entire global network is highly au-tomated, thanks to software-defi ned networking technol-ogy (SD-WAN). Instead of confi guring each network component manually, specialists can now manage the network centrally from a software console. On any infra-structure, too. “Today, we can provide connectivity for orga-nizations much more quickly; it almost takes only one keystroke to provision fi rewalls and other services,” ex-plained Molck-Ude.

RAPID RESPONSE IS NEEDEDHere’s an example. A new branch offi ce, needing to get on-line quickly, uses a temporary cellular connection until a dedicated line can be provisioned. It then painlessly cuts over to the new line – a switch that no longer requires time-consuming manual confi guration. So fl exible is this innova-tive network approach that retailers can not only set up new permanent locations, but can respond quickly to online

With the advent of 5G cellular technology, thousands of additional “virtual reality

spectators” will attend concerts or sporting events.

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If cars are going to drive autonomously and ambulances are going to be able to turn traffi c lights green, sender/receiver information should take no more than a millise-cond to transmit.

competition by opening pop-up stores. As long as there is Internet access, they can essentially get the network infra-structure for these provisional shops overnight.

There are calls for adaptable networks in other indus-tries, too. For example, Hartmut Beuß, CIO of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, has said, “A modern state data network needs to provide high bandwidth and be able to adapt it quickly.” By 2018, 60% of enterprises will adopt software-defi ned networks for remote branch connectivity, predicts IDC.

FLEXIBLE CONNECTIVITY FOR A FLEXIBLE CLOUDOrganizations want more fl exibility in using clouds, too. It’s easy to get cloud services ready. And even easier to give users access to public clouds over the Internet. But these connections just don’t offer the security or performance that many businesses and governments demand. It takes time to provision high-performance connectivity between a cloud and a secure network for thousands of employees. This is partly because each provider has different technical and organizational rules for connecting to its cloud. “How-ever, organizations want the ability to connect to and switch cloud platforms quickly,” said Molck-Ude. To meet this de-mand, T-Systems plans to connect multiple clouds to enter-prise networks over preconfi gured gateways. That way, connections can be up and running in just a few days, in-stead of weeks, as is currently the case. The service is al-ready available for Microsoft Azure Cloud in Germany, but will extend in the fi rst half of 2018 to Microsoft Cloud Global and several data centers for Amazon Web Services. Other cloud providers and locations will follow.

TIME FOR REAL TIMEIt helps little to provision networks quickly if the network it-self is slow, though. Alexa, for instance, would seem posi-tively slow-witted if her voice data lazily chugged its way from the data center to your living room. Or take cars. They should be completely autonomous by 2022, forecasts con-sulting fi rm Frost & Sullivan. But that implies that vehicles can look far into the distance – and so see black ice com-ing or know about the traffi c jam around the next turn. For that to happen, data has to fl y through the cellular network at a mind-boggling speed. Specifi cally, information needs to travel from sender to receiver in one millisecond or less. That’s a requirement that next-generation 5G cellular net-works will meet.

Deutsche Telekom is already vigorously researching the superhero of cellular technology. At 5G:haus, its inno-vation laboratory, it works closely with start-ups, research institutions and network equipment vendors. By using technologies similar to SD-WAN, 5G:haus has managed to virtually separate high-bandwidth video streaming and time-critical autopilot functions while physically supporting them with the same infrastructure. Ultra-high data rates re-quire something else, too: “We need new and signifi cantly more antennas than before as well as running fi ber to our base stations,” explained Christian Wietfeld, who re-searches 5G at the Technical University of Dortmund (see page 22).

Two-thirds of European internet users shop online. Source: Statistical Office of the European Union (EUROSTAT), 2016

Problem is, there’s no practical way to roll out a stan-dardized security concept to millions of connected de-vices. “That’s why we need security embedded in the network,” said Molck-Ude. “A global SD-WAN can help. It lets us provision network security services quickly, simply and consistently: fi rewalls, web security and separate vir-tual networks.” Networks can fend off DDoS attacks, too. T-Systems can automatically cut off an incoming deluge of requests at the backbone as soon as it receives attack re-ports from detection systems in the customer data center.

ONLINE WORLDWIDE – RIGHT OUT OF THE BOX Companies interested in connecting their products to the Internet – say, in order to offer customers value-added ser-vices like remote maintenance – face another obstacle: they need worldwide cellular Internet service. Sounds easy – the Internet is everywhere, after all. In reality, it’s hideously complicated. Laws prohibit the use of one SIM profi le to access the Internet for extended periods in different coun-

Mobile bandwidth has reached a turning point, too. In August 2016, a Deutsche Telekom test lab broke through the one-gigabit mark for the fi rst time. Bandwidths are poised to skyrocket under 5G. ITU, the European standard-ization body, expects to see upload rates of 10 gigabits a second and download rates of 20 gigabits a second under ideal conditions. At that speed, you could don a virtual real-ity headset and experience live soccer matches as though you were sitting in the stands with the crowd instead of rest-ing on your couch at home. And the 5G network wouldn’t even stumble if thousands of virtual viewers tuned into the match. According to ITU, it can feed data to a million de-vices per square kilometer – without any loss of quality. That’s 1,000 times more than today’s cellular networks.

SECURITY IN THE NETWORKCars and VR headsets aren’t the only things going online. Today, vending machines order refi lls, machines request maintenance and smoke detectors notify fi re departments. According to analysts, by 2020, over 20 billion devices will be connected worldwide. Numbers of this magnitude re-quire more than just greater cellular network capacity; they demand an entirely new approach to cybersecurity. Every new device, every connected sensor opens up another po-tential backdoor for hackers.

Exhibit A are the botnets controlled by the Mirai mal-ware, which gained notoriety after a DDoS attack on the DNS provider for Twitter, Paypal, Netfl ix and others in Octo-ber 2016. Cyber criminals had infected hundreds of thou-sands of cameras and refrigerators and directed them to fl ood DNS servers with innumerable requests. “Big compa-nies such as Microsoft, Google or Apple employ experts for IoT security to make things like smartphones as secure as possible,” said US security expert Bruce Schneier. “How-ever, if you buy a webcam to monitor your baby, a refrigera-tor or a thermostat, no expert for IoT security will have been involved with it.”

Literally fundamental. Telematics and IoT will be the foundational solutions for transportation and logistics systems and their value chains.

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Foundations of digitization

tries. Let’s imagine that a camera maker wants to package mobile connectivity with its products in 50 countries so that photographers can instantly upload their pictures to Insta-gram from anywhere in the world. To do this, it would have to sign a contract with a local Internet service provider for local SIM cards in every single country. Translation: 50 part-ners, 50 approaches, 50 rates. As if that’s not enough, the manufacturer has to charge photographers for their indi-vidual data use. Talk about a daunting task.

“But that’s exactly what our core competence is,” said Molck-Ude. “We offer organizations global integrated mo-bile connectivity as an all-in-one, single-source package.” T-Systems negotiates with local carriers and handles the billing. BMW, for example, brought in the Deutsche Tele-kom subsidiary to implement an in-car mobile hotspot so that passengers in over 50 countries could watch stream-ing video on the road. One day, these solutions may be built around eSIM technology, where an integrated SIM card switches, on command, from being a card for a French car-rier to one for an Italian carrier.

MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS MADE EASYContract chaos is a problem for connected workers, not just connected devices. In the US, UK and Australia, 80 percent of employees have one or more corporate-issued mobile devices, according to analysts. And they have the same problem as the cameras in our previous example. Organizations end up partnering with multiple cellular car-riers, depending on where they do business, and then juggle different contracts, rates and invoice formats. To avoid these kinds of headaches, Deutsche Telekom has joined forces with TeliaSonera, Orange and Telecom Italia to form the European FreeMove Alliance. Being a sub-sidiary of an alliance member, T-Systems can provide mul-tinational corporations with mobile communications in over 100 countries – but with only one point of contact.

of all network changes are manually driven. Source: Gartner

More than

80 %

Point and shoot, not point and search: with embedded connectiv-ity, companies can connect their products to networks worldwide. Camera makers, for example, can offer devices that come bundled with mobile connectivity.

Next-generation communications networks are fast, agile, simple and secure. That’s how they drive digital in-novation around the globe. They can beam virtual assis-tants onto our smartphones as we sit in a train or on a beach. And who knows? One day, Alexa may end up as a secretary, sorting e-mails, booking conference rooms and answering phone calls. Or maybe she’ll help customers fi nd their favorite pasta at the grocery store – all thanks to a powerful network.

frank.westermann@t-systems.com www.ngena.net

www.t-systems.com/solutions/networkswww.t-systems.com/solutions/network-security

www.t-systems.com/video/network

Scan the code to learn more about this topic.

Digitization without networks? Can’t happen! But how are the old corporate networks supposed to keep pace with digital change? Two innovative ideas.

Blue skies, buoyant spirits, jam-packed tents and long lines at the rides – Munich’s Okto-berfest is a huge undertaking, even for the telecommunications infrastructure. At peak hours on busy days, there can be up to

300,000 people chatting on cell phones, posting pictures and uploading videos to the Internet. That doesn’t even in-clude the cash machines and emergency call lines or the 144 food service companies who operate debit card read-ers and regularly call in more orders for sausage and pret-zels over the phone. To fortify the networks for this data onslaught, network operators allocate additional band-width and install special lines for phone calls, webcams and credit and debit card processing. It’s a sprawling proj-ect that takes over ten weeks. All for just two-and-a-half weeks of partying.

Demand surges aren’t restricted to the 600-plus busi-nesses scattered across the Oktoberfest fairgrounds, though. Today, organizations in all industries often need network infrastructure to be up and running in short order. They want to quickly connect new sites, machines and products or set up a dedicated virtual network for video surveillance in a flash (see box). But that requires special-ists to manually configure the networks – a time-consum-ing affair.

Virtualized network technology?

Brightensthe

mood

COPY Yvonne Nestler

“If retailers decide to expand, their new stores will immediately get access to the corporate network as well.”

ULRICH WELSS, Vice President Enterprise Networks T-Systems

NO ONE IS GLOBAL ENOUGHThat’s not the only challenge, either. In today’s globalized world, organizations may need Internet service in Brazil to-day and a firewall in China tomorrow. But not even big tele-communications providers have networks in every corner of the world. They have to partner with local providers. That takes coordination and hence time. When all is said and done, it can take up to six months to provision a new line.

T-Systems’ Smart SD-WAN solves both problems: the plodding pace of network expansions and modifications and the absence of infrastructure with close to universal worldwide coverage. “Organizations get an IP-based pri-vate network that they can essentially control at a keystroke, all around the globe,” said Ulrich Welss, Vice President En-terprise Networks at T-Systems.

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WATCHING NETWORKS CHANGE BEFORE YOUR EYESWant to set up an additional virtual network for video surveillance or customer WiFi with only a few clicks? At the Innovation Center Munich, visitors can experience the adaptability of Smart SD-WAN powered by ngena for them-selves. The showcase isn’t a simulation, either. “We’re directly connected to the highly automated network platform and the ngena portal,” said innovation manager Sascha Steiner. In other words, the innovation management team operates a live network between the ngena node in Frankfurt, the Innovation Center in Munich and its development and management office in Darmstadt.

the Internet or an ethernet. All connections automatically come with end-to-end encryption, a security precaution that used to require tremendous effort to extend to small offices. Since the product launch in September 2017, ac-cess has been available in Germany, broad swathes of Eu-rope, North America and Hong Kong. Value-added services such as firewalls, multi-VPNs and regional internet gate-ways are already available, with more on the way.

Configuring these services was once complicated, but is now fully automated with Smart SD-WAN. Step by step, T-Systems is rolling out L and XL access designs, additio-nal services and a broader international footprint.

“Now, if a retailer decides to expand, its new stores will immediately get access not only to the IT services in the cloud, but to the corporate network as well,” said Welss. Company networks, in other words, no longer run the risk of missing the boat to a high-speed future.

Ulrich.Welss@t-systems.com www.t-systems.com/smart-sd-wan www.t-systems.com/videos/smart-sd-wan

A DIFFERENT TAKE ON BUSINESS AND OPERATIONSThis product builds on two innovative ideas enabled by the services and processes of ngena (Next Generation En-terprise Alliance). For one, the alliance weaves its part-ners’ networks into a global grid and provides a standard menu of products based on that web. Now, if a customer requests services, T-Systems no longer has to contact mul-tiple local partners one by one to ask how much the re-quested services would cost, assuming they’re available at all. The ngena alliance does away with that whole pro-cess. Second, ngena uses virtual network technology to automate network platforms. Being a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), the platform can be man-aged, modified and monitored centrally. That allows T-Systems to provide new services and connectivity much faster worldwide.

HYBRID ACCESSOrganizations can currently choose among three VPN ac-cess designs: XS, S or M. Depending on the option chosen, Smart SD-WAN provides single or redundant access using

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Networks

Smart SD-WAN

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T-Systems aims to make digitization easy, fast and hassle free for its customers. And what exactly does this demand?

Molck-Ude: We need to pay much closer attention to our customers. To do that we need much deeper insights into their industry, the challenges they face, and we need to tackle the question: How can we help them be more succesful in their market or entering even into new markets?

Fleutiaux: Taking for example the automotive industry. OEM manufactur-ers are entering currently multiple markets at the same time. This de-mands from us special expertise along the products’ value chain. We have this expertise, experience necessary to manage the complexity of digitization and we have the kind of broad portfolio. This is key to build individual, straightforward, and easy to use solutions for our customers tailored to meet their needs.

Networks need to be fast, mobile ready, and secure. How will you realize that and keep the whole piece simple?

Molck-Ude: The digitization itself drives this topic. Customers want to be faster, more agile, and that all over the world. Therefore we need a plat-form that allows us to provide our services on an international scale. Add to that 24/7 provision and reliability – the highest level of security for our customers, who grow more and more dependent on their net-work – in a positive sense – the more they shift their applications to the cloud. Apart from price sensitivity it is important to guarantee the same

COPY Thomas van Zütphen

Performance is TeamplayT-Systems Managing Directors Patrick Molck-Ude and François Fleutiaux on assets, the linking of portfolios, and the need to meet customers’ expectations.

Patrick Molck-Ude (left) and François Fleutiaux.

speed across several cloud platforms to ensure customers can imple-ment custom-made technological solutions in line with their own strat-egy. That is what we at T-Systems are prepared for – both on the mobile services side with partnerships like FreeMove as well as on the fixed network side where we are combining up to 25 international top part-ners in a global network with ngena. We’ve got a highly standardised and highly automated platform with which we can provide the services our customers want globally.

Fleutiaux: There is no doubt that the Internet of Things will be the almighty technical booster for digitization. By 2020 more than 25 billion ma-chines, devices and sensors will be integrated in the world of the IoT. In order to store and analyse that flood of data we will need even more powerful data centres equipped with scalable and secure cloud plat-forms on the IT side and super powerful networks with different prob-ably software-defined network technologies on the TC side.

Customers need a network-corresponding infrastructure. How does our combined TC and IT offering benefit our customers?

Molck-Ude: Without a network there is no digitization. That’s why, when we talk to our customers about a digitization plan, we always ask: Is the customer already positioned to implement digitization through the net-work right now? In other words: Which requirements do they have in terms of Service Level Agreements, that we then need to realise on the fixed network or mobile network side, or worst case via satellite.

Fleutiaux: What makes us so attractive for our customers, is when we look at their challenges we’re able to discuss with them on the IT part but also on the telco part because for us they are completely linked. And with the demand for global delivery we combine the best of both worlds at the best price, we create the best arbitrage and combination between a high performing network, high performing data centres, our customers’ positioning, and ensure the interplay works well together.

What economic significance will industrial IT platforms and the pro-vision of corresponding services have for Europe?

Fleutiaux: Industry 4.0 is all about platforms, we’re talking here about stan-dardisation, automation, potentially what artificial intelligence can bring and the impact on the IT business. Machine-to-machine commu-nication or network value chains that could create new production logic, are examples for the potential and economic importance of the industrial IT platforms for Europe. Here we have a competitive advan-tage because of, once again, the link of our knowledge in networks and our knowledge in IT, which we can combine and use in the IoT sector like no other. The interplay of our expertise in IT and networks makes the Internet of Things the perfect playground for Deutsche Tele-kom and T-Systems.

Molck-Ude: Telecommunications too is becoming more and more of a platform business. What used to be an intelligent network is now split up into the network and the intelligence component. That’s the key-word ‘software defined’, that means I’m buying a topology, be it a back-bone, or the network in a country, build it up to a network infrastructure, and then operate and control it through intelligence. And we connect these telecommunication platforms that we’re currently developing for fixed networks and mobile networks with IT platforms like our Open Telekom Cloud, Amazon, Google or Microsoft to deliver the best pos-sible services globally.

Patrick Molck-Ude François Fleutiaux

After studying business administration, Patrick Molck-Ude, born in 1966, spent in various Top Manage-ment positions at IBM. Since 2004 in different executive functions at Deutsche Telekom AG, he has been Managing Director of the TC Division and Member of the Board of Management of T-Systems since January 2015.

As a computer scientist by education, François Fleutiaux, born in 1965, began his professional career in 1989 at IBM. After various Top Management functions at Unisys and Fujitsu he has been appointed a Member of the Board of Management of T-Systems and Managing Director of the IT Division since September 1, 2017.

How can we speed up the journey towards the goal of ‘keeping IT simple’ for customers?

Fleutiaux: At its core, the IT Division is about managed services. We are not Amazon and we do not want to be a place where someone puts a credit card in, orders something, and then cannot talk to anyone. We want to be a company that simplifies of course, managing a business for the customer with strong service level agreements, reliable commit-ments and security standards. And we want to be that player whatever the technology is about.

Molck-Ude: Speaking of commitment. We are talking to big companies, who will say straightforward: ‘We’re going to take all our data centres, discontinue their operations, and move them to the cloud. And to do that we need a network provider who will support me because I want everything to be available in the cloud, everywhere across the world.’ And what’s implied in that is: ‘Everyone who supports us is our partner. Everyone else will be phased out.’ And then differentiation becomes important. Providing technology is one thing. But at the end of the day our employees and their know-how and expertise are what makes the difference for the customers. We want them to say: Damn, they really get us, they are prepared, they are in tune with us, and they have peo-ple who are motivated to drive our development together.

5G is possibly the most exciting area of innovative technological development. How well prepared are we for its arrival?

Molck-Ude: We need to drive that from different perspectives. The busi-ness model, the technology and infrastructure side as well as its admin-istration. To really exploit the net and its opportunities – let’s say for autonomous driving – I need to move the data center to the road to real-ize latencies that will be possible in the future. Besides that I’d like to focus on the question, how does 5G work across boarders? Because that means creating standards, legislative norms that are applicable all over the continent or even worldwide.

Fleutiaux: We at Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems are well prepared for this in good time. We are for example in close discussions with the leading OEMs and suppliers to make the so called day-one use case for autonomous driving, which will allow signal processing for emer-gency vehicles on public crossroads. This increases the security for pedestrians and sets the basis for autonomous driving powered by 5G.

patrick.molck-ude@telekom.de francois.fleutiaux@t-systems.com

www.t-systems.com/digital-transformation www.t-systems.com/solutions/networks

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In Germany alone, fire departments put out 200,000 home fires every year. And that doesn’t even include large-scale operations like forest fires, chemical accidents and gas explosions. To minimize the risk to these brave men and women who put their lives on the line, T-Systems developed the Connected T-Shirt. An innovation from the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary’s Connected Things Integrator.

Hello, is this the fire department? Our build-ing’s on fire, it’s on fire!” This dramatic cry for help, made on a bright October day, was one of an average of roughly 80 emergency calls fielded by the professional fire department in

Krefeld every day. “Rescue, recover, protect” – the mission and promise of all fire departments worldwide – is the last hope for over 30,000 people seeking help in this city of 235,000 souls every year. They report a miscellany of emer-gencies: from a smoldering fire at a fertilizer depot by the Rhine River to unexploded ordnance found downtown to a gas main ruptured by an excavator in a residential neigh-borhood. From thousands of emergency medical and res-cue calls following traffic accidents all the way to a forlorn kitten that scampered up into the crown of a cherry tree, but can’t seem to find its way back down.

On this day, at 11:37, the agitated caller had phoned in to report “thick smoke filling the staircase” in her apart-ment building. There were “eight, or maybe nine, doorbells at the front door, I don’t know the exact number,” she said. “But I do know that the young man who lives across the hall has been in a wheelchair for weeks.”

Fear, panic, apprehension – they’re understandable responses to a fire. But there was no adrenalin-fueled hys-teria or sheer horror on the other end of the line. Calmly, collectedly and with the kind of efficiency that comes from years of routine, the fire department’s emergency dispatch-ers employed headsets, monitors, keyboards and mice to coordinate the next steps. Every action was swift and skilled, but deliberately unhurried.

PHONE LOCATOR SAVES PRECIOUS MINUTESWithin seconds, the caller’s address flashed onto the big-gest screen in the room, alongside a street map showing possible routes to the scene of the fire. How? Deutsche Telekom had built a database that links addresses to phone numbers – including the landline that the old woman used to call for help from her apartment. It was a lucky thing. Cel-lular call tracking was far less accurate. The fire was in a cul-de-sac, right by a train line, but nonetheless accessible to fire trucks coming from two directions. It was still not clear how many people might be in danger, though. In these types of cases, dispatchers normally sent out two “engine companies” – 40 responders in all.

The call went out, “Vehicles ELW 11, HLF 11, HLF 12 and DLK!” Less than four minutes later, the first company, containing a command support vehicle, two heavy rescue vehicles and a turntable ladder truck, pulled out of the fire station. Six kilometers away, the exact same scenario played out again, announced first by the ear-shattering siren at the fire station, then by the wailing sirens of the fire engines. Here, at Krefeld’s parallel fire station, the second unit rolled out.

CONNECTED FROM THE STARTAs Incident Commander Christoph Manten hurtled toward the scene of the fire in the command support vehicle, he glanced down at his laptop and saw how many people were registered at the burning house. The notification, initi-ated by the dispatch center, had come directly from the local resident registration office. Information mattered in an emergency. That’s why the Krefeld Fire Department also had floor plans and maps of more than 400 local buildings – mostly government facilities – that could be beamed onto

90 %Nine out of every ten people

who die in home fires actually succumb to smoke and gas inhalation, and not to burns

from flames.

Safety through telematics. Pulling on a Connected T-Shirt at the start of a shift can save lives in high-risk jobs like firefighting.

The Krefeld Fire Department’s emergency dispatchers employ headsets, monitors, keyboards and mice to

coordinate the response to any accident.

COPY Thomas van Zütphen

from the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary’s Connected Things Integrator. A test under highly realistic conditions.

The caller wasn’t exaggerating. Two blocks from the fire, Manten, Jakels and the rest of the unit could already see the billowing smoke. In fact, the only difference be-tween this scenario and a real operation was the absence of bystanders, flustered neighbors and self-appointed ‘pho-tojournalists’ holding their cell phones aloft and getting in the way of the firefighters. In seconds, the teams climbed down from the vehicles. Everyone on Manten’s team knew what to do. Before Jakels and the rest of the “first attack team” charged into the house, they each retrieved a self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) from brackets on the truck. In one fluid movement, they strapped the tanks to their backs, slipped the masks over their heads and con-nected the two together. And in that moment, the T-shirt wrapped around Jakel’s torso went “on air.”

WHEN VITAL SIGNS SAVE YOUR LIFEThe shirt, made by T-Systems’ technology partner Teiimo, was equipped with a “pod” – a telematics unit located right below the nape of the wearer’s neck. Thin, barely percepti-ble heat- and sweat-resistant wires ran through the fabric in erratic, meandering loops that allowed the shirt to be stretched and washed. They transmitted Jakel’s heart rate, captured by two sensors on the side of his chest. At the same time, a next-generation accelerometer in the pod detected the fireman’s every movement. To do this, a calcu-lation process combined the rotation and translation of the GPS-enabled pod over six different axes. The advanced mathematics allowed the device to track the wearer’s loca-tion and movements. A memory chip recorded the raw data in order to instantly recognize any type of adverse event. A fall, for example, could be instantly reported wirelessly to an IoT platform in the cloud. The platform generally com-municated with Incident Commander Manten’s tablet over the internet, but also managed the pods and pushed out regular updates to them.

“The Connected T-Shirt is the product of a program that originally focused on digitizing the construction indus-try, but has since extended into other areas such as fire-fighting. Its main goal is to manage operations data, prevent theft and inventory materials and machines at large

“If this solution saves just one life, that would be a priceless return on investment.”

MARKUS ZSCHEILE, Head of the Connected Things Integration Solution Center at T-Systems

When an alarm call comes in, firefighers can gain valuable seconds by skipping the stairs and sliding down the firepole instead.

an incident commander’s laptop in an emergency. Unfor-tunately, the department’s central computer didn’t have a floor plan for the caller’s apartment building. “NEF and RTW en route,” barked the emergency dispatcher. The ab-breviations told Manten that an ambulance and a quick re-sponse vehicle had also been sent out. Trailing Manten was a vehicle that held nine firemen, including Nico Jakels, a seven-year veteran. On this Wednesday, he had reported to work at 6:45 am.

A few minutes later, standing before his locker in the “clean section” of the fire station’s changing room, the 35-year-old traded his street clothes for a station uniform, including a rather ordinary-looking T-shirt. However, this plain black shirt, which shimmered slightly in the light, could one day save his life. On this day, the emergency call at 11:37, the alarm, roll-out and firefighting operation were all part of a test that the Krefeld Fire Department was run-ning with T-Systems. Their goal: to determine the opera-tional fitness of a “Connected T-Shirt,” the latest innovation

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plants and construction sites,” ex-plained Thomas Barth, Program Manager for the Connected Things Integrator. That includes € 1,000 angle grinders to € 40,000 concrete scanners all the way to caterpillar cranes worth hundreds of thousands of euros. Owners, rental companies and insurance carriers all want to know who uses the equipment, where they use it, and how.

“Our solution is now being used for broader applications, such as im-proving worker safety in potentially dangerous situations. For example, mechanics working on oil platforms or linemen servicing high-voltage lines.” But its uses go further. Today, the corporate fire brigade of a large industrial company in southern Ger-many and T-Systems are trialing the Connected T-Shirt over a several-month period.

AFTER 80 SECONDS: “WATER ON!”Once again, Incident Commander Manten wished that the initial fire report showed all available hydrants near the scene of the fire. It was a problem for Krefeld, like for many fire departments throughout Germany. The hoses that Jakels and his team were directing at the fire were being fed by 2,000 liter tanks on board the two heavy rescue ve-hicles. That might sound like a lot, but each of the three hoses was pumping out 150 liters of water a minute. Soon, the on-board tanks would be sucked dry.

Floor by floor, apartment by apartment, the firefighters worked their way through the four-story building. All the neighbors had been accounted for, except for the wheel-chair-bound young man that the caller had mentioned. The fire had evidently broken out in his apartment, which Jakels was now carefully checking, one room at a time. The smoke was so thick he could barely see his hand in front of his face. While the rest of the team fought the obvious source of the fire in the adjoining living room, Jakels edged into the kitchen. But the flames were persistent. When the window panes shattered, they extended an open invitation to the wind and oxygen that kept the fire alive.

Fires that defied extinguishment were loud. That much Jakels knew after responding to more than 200 emergency fire calls over the years. Now, though, he felt the heat radi-ate against his back, surrounded by a solid wall of smoke with a cacophony of loud commandos echoing around him. Questions, status reports, new questions, new instruc-

“We’re closely watching the emergence of solutions that improve firefighter safety.”

CHRISTOPH MANTEN, Incident Commander, Krefeld Fire Department

The cloud-based IoT platform tracks vital signs and also tells

the incident commander the location, movements and

recent body orientation of a missing team member.

tions. But what the untrained observer would have per-ceived as a seething mass of infernal chaos was perfectly intelligible to every one of the firemen. Was the water sup-ply still uninterrupted? – Where was the missing person? – And how much longer would the SCBA canisters still have air? – The men had to “get air” at least every 20 minutes. In other words: leave the building and swap out breathing ap-paratuses. Jakels and his team still had 120 seconds left. Suddenly, Incident Commander Manten realized that one of his men might not find his way down the smoke-filled staircase alone. And that had nothing to do with all the equipment, axes, hammers, fire extinguishers, prybars, torn-out doors, hoses, couplings, reducers, fittings and clamps lying on the stairs.

WHEN EVERY SECOND COUNTSAn incoming text message had sent Manten scurrying for his laptop. The message sender: the IoT platform in the cloud. A quick glance at the display confirmed the alarm: Jakel’s Connected T-shirt had stopped reporting any movement. The Motionactivity function – which measures the current speed of the T-shirt, or rather, the pod inte-grated near the nape of the wearer’s neck – stood at “Zero.” Manten scanned the screen for Jakel’s body tem-perature, pulse and GPS coordinates. No question: if there hadn’t been a missing person in the building before, there was one now. And time was running out. Quite literally: be-sides the Connected T-Shirt, Jakel’s air bottle was also constantly connected to his computer. And it had less than two minutes of air left.

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What truly electrified the incident commander, though, was the “Body Orientation” function. An orientation angle – as the experts called it – of 88° to 110° would be normal for someone walking upright. If a fireman edged forward while bent over, the angle would drop to around 60°. At 45°, though, an alarm would be sounded by a smart rule defined in the cloud. And Jakel’s body orientation had sud-denly plummeted to 3°. Much lower than if he were just crawling through the house. Even worse, Jakel’s position was no longer changing at all.

GOODBYE, ATTACK. HELLO, SEARCH AND RESCUE. Instead of ordering Jakel’s team back toward the fire with fresh air, Manten sent another search and rescue team into the house. The men knew from the initial team where to look for Jakels. And that was a good thing on this late October day.

“Our next development goal is a high-precision solu-tion that incorporates additional information channels for our T-shirts,” said Christian Kapitza, Senior Consultant and Product Owner in T-Systems’ scrum development team.

“Our goal is a high-precision

solution that incorporates

additional information channels.”

CHRISTIAN KAPITZA, Scrum development team

T-Systems

That might include 3D visualizations of architecture and topography or air pressure sensors that supply data that the device’s tiny computer can use for sensor fusion pur-poses. “Algorithms allow us to continue calculating the shirt’s position even without a GPS signal. Ultimately, we want to be able to pinpoint its position as accurately as pos-sible in or outside buildings.” In addition, new wireless technologies and cellular standards like NarrowBand IoT and 5G make communications between incident com-manders and team members even more robust.

Between Manten’s instructions and the first team’s rec-ollections, it didn’t take long for the search and rescue team to find Jakels: surrounded by dense smoke, collapsed on top of a wheelchair that its temporary user evidently no longer needed. In the last remaining seconds, the four men carried their injured comrade down the staircase, pulled off the SCBA mask and watched, relieved, as he filled his lungs with fresh air.

“We’re closely watching the emergence of solutions that improve firefighter safety and help us rescue team members in trouble – which can happen during any call,” said Christoph Manten, Incident Commander at the Krefeld Fire Department. “I guarantee that professional, corporate and volunteer fire departments everywhere – not just in Krefeld – will gratefully accept any opportunity to use, test, compare and evaluate the types of innovations that we’ve seen today.” That sentiment was echoed by Markus Zscheile, Head of the Connected Things Integration Solu-tion Center at T-Systems: “You always want to know whether your research and development work delivered a good ROI (return on investment). But if our solution saves just one firefighter’s life in Germany, where fire depart-ments respond to 200,000 home fires every year, that would be a priceless return on investment.”

markus.zscheile@t-systems.com www.t-systems.com/solutions/iot

Dense smoke can make it hard to tell that a fellow firefighter is in

trouble. With Connected T-Shirts, team members can marshal an immediate response if needed.

The networks of tomorrow Professor Christian Wietfeld, Chair for Communications Networks at the Technical University of Dortmund, and Professor Michael ten Hompel, Managing Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML), about the business impact of next-generation cellular technologies and a worldwide standard for narrowband data communications and why the future would come to a halt without them.

Digital transformation is driving the wholesale integration of economic and societal processes, largely based on cellular technology. Are our cellular networks ready for digitization?

Professor Wietfeld: It’s important to realize that cellular networks have undergone an amazing evolution in recent years. Who would have thought that today’s smartphones would transfer fi ve to six gigabytes of data per month? And that’s modest by private user standards. Problems still remain, however. Coverage is good, but doesn’t reach everywhere. And data is still transferred with a certain delay. Clearly, the infrastructure has to continue evolving in order to make digitization possible.

By that, you’re referring to 5G, the super cellular standard known as LTE’s successor. Why do we need data rates that are faster than 1 gigabit per second, like with LTE Advanced?

Professor Wietfeld: Unlike its predecessors, 5G doesn’t focus exclu-sively on data rates. It’s more about enabling new classes of ap-plications with demanding requirements, with latency fi rst and foremost among them. Under 5G, latency – i.e. the delay between requesting data and actually receiving it – is only one millisecond. By comparison, latencies in today’s best networks range from ten to 20 milliseconds. Scalability is another key factor. The advent of the Internet of Things will introduce many more devices into our networks. And the networks need to be prepared.

And that’s where another cellular standard enters the picture: NarrowBand IoT, or NB-IoT for short. Why do we need NB-IoT if 5G is coming soon?

Professor ten Hompel: We need both standards: 5G and NB-IoT. Why? Well, 5G is a broadband technology that can transfer large volumes of data with low latencies. NarrowBand IoT, by contrast,

COPY Roger Homrich

Networks as interfaces. Professors Christian Wietfeld (right) and Michael ten Hompel conduct interdisciplinary research at the Technical University of Dortmund.

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uses very little power to transfer small amounts of information. Both technologies offer specifi c advantages for industry and end user applications. For example, NB-IoT is powerful enough for text messaging or simple phone calls. But if you want to watch a movie, you’ll need 5G. Also, 5G supports the kind of real-time data communications needed to control industrial equipment.

Which NB-IoT obviously can’t do?Professor ten Hompel: Correct. NB-IoT isn’t a real-time technology.

It’s only suitable for applications that can tolerate latencies of up to ten seconds. That’s suffi cient for most applications that we can currently envision in logistics, for instance. In logistics, you really don’t care if the location tracking information is several seconds old. You just want know where a particular product or shipment is right about now. NB-IoT offers another advantage: ultra-low power consumption. Many applications require low power consumption and long battery lives. With NB-IoT, simple devices can run for fi ve to ten years without ever needing a new battery.

Often, data rates are considered yardsticks of network quality. By that light, 5G isn’t an obvious choice. Does it have another important feature other than low latency?

Professor Wietfeld: I wouldn’t completely ignore data rates. The fu-ture will bring more and more applications that need higher data rates. Under 5G, data rates will increase to as much as one gigabit per second. Scalability matters a lot, too. LTE just can’t keep up when there are 250,000 devices sending and receiving data within a single square kilometer. That’s a multiple of the number of devices we currently have connected to the network.

Professor ten Hompel: Scalability is one of NB-IoT’s clear strengths. We’re talking about a 100-fold increase over conventional GSM cellular applications. That means we can attach 100 times as many devices to a single router. It’s an ideal feature for logistics because NB-IoT can be used to connect a large number of con-tainers. Take a high-bay warehouse, for example, that contains thousands of connected items, all sending data. That won’t work without NB-IoT.

The commercial use of drones in industries like mining or agriculture will make Narrow-Band IoT much more effi cient in the future.

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Does NB-IoT have other advantages that distinguish it from 5G and favor the adoption of both wireless technologies?

Professor ten Hompel: NB-IoT is roughly 100 times more efficient at utilizing high frequencies. That allows us – in contrast to previous cellular standards – to send data from every building. Here’s a really down-to-earth example: whenever you step into an elevator or drive into an underground garage, you probably lose reception. Not so with NB-IoT. In my eyes, it’s not about whether we need one technology or the other. We need both.

But the low latencies offered by 5G surely depend on other fac-tors, too. Didn’t providers have to build a denser antenna net-work for LTE?

Professor Wietfeld: Latency is about more than the lag between the device and the base station. What really matters is end-to-end la-tency, that is, the latency all the way to the server running the application. That’s why it’s so important to move the servers into the base stations, creating what we call an “edge cloud”. Essen-tially, application functionality is brought out to the edge of the cloud, which makes it possible to satisfy demanding latency re-quirements. Data also has to be brought into the landline net-work, and so the base stations need to be connected to a fiber optic infrastructure.

Does that mean we’ll be stuck with even more ugly antennas in the future?

Professor Wietfeld: Antennas are already nestled fairly close to-gether in urban areas. Since 5G antennas – also known as Mas-sive MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output) antennas – are more powerful, the initial phase of the 5G buildout can get by with our current base stations. In areas with ultra-high demand, though, new base stations will be needed. In these cases, innovative, highly flat geometries will make it possible to integrate antennas into buildings elegantly. So there may be more antennas, but they won’t be an eyesore.

There are still no mass-market products based on NB-IoT. And we won’t have stable nationwide networks before the end of 2018. How long will it take for NB-IoT to reach the mainstream?

Professor ten Hompel: NB-IoT has a lot of mainstream appeal. These are low-cost applications with immediate and concrete paybacks. In the next five to seven years, we expect to have around 20 billion

devices, many of which will be connected over NB-IoT. Just think: that’s double the number of devices in our current Internet. We will be tripling the size of today’s Internet within just a few years. It’s a tremendous challenge and a gigantic market.

What industries will benefit the most from NB-IoT?Professor ten Hompel: All the industries that transfer and need rela-

tively small amounts of information will benefit from NB-IoT. It will enable a host of end user applications such as utility metering. Or take something as simple as a doorbell. One day, it, too, might offer NB-IoT functionality so that you can send doorbell signals to your cell phone, potentially augmented by a small camera. But the main focus is on industrial applications. The ability to extend pro-cesses beyond and across organizational boundaries will play a big role in integrating production, retail and logistics networks in the future.

What applications will use 5G?Professor Wietfeld: The prototypical 5G application is automated,

connected driving on public roads. Being a safety-critical appli-cation, it requires real-time communications and guaranteed reliability.

“In my eyes, it’s not about whether we need 5G or NarrowBand IoT.

We need both.”

PROF. MICHAEL TEN HOMPEL, Chair of Materials Handling and Warehousing TU Dortmund

is the Chair of Materials Handling and Warehousing at the Technical University of Dortmund, the Managing Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics (IML) and a Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST). The electrical engineer is also a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and the Logistics Hall of Fame.

Professor Michael ten Hompel

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Prof. Christian Wietfeld expects Germany to have full 5G coverage starting in 2025.

Germany isn’t exactly a pioneer in autonomous driving. Can we even expect Germany to play a leading role in the introduc-tion of 5G?

Professor Wietfeld: Don’t underestimate Germany’s capabilities in autonomous driving. We’re definitely in the 5G vanguard since 5G’s killer apps target our core industries: automotive, energy and logistics. That opens up big opportunities for us. But the competi-tion isn’t resting on its laurels. Asia and the US are pressing ahead with 5G at a rapid pace. We’ll have to push ourselves if we want to keep up. Luckily, Germany is in a very good position for the future.

When will we have a full-coverage 5G network throughout Germany?

Professor Wietfeld: The 5G rollout will probably take several more years. Pilot applications are expected to start coming out in 2018. But they will be highly localized. For that reason, I don’t expect to see full 5G coverage before 2025.

Which will also delay the NB-IoT rollout.Professor ten Hompel: First of all, NB-IoT is a global standard in its

own right. It may be a part of 5G, but that doesn’t mean it has to wait for 5G. NB-IoT will introduce ultra-low-cost devices with long service lives into the Internet. We’re talking about highly scalable applications – virtually limitless numbers of devices that can be used in parallel to monitor and control logistics networks, for ex-ample. And that will be the first mass market for 5G.

So we don’t have to wait for 5G?Professor ten Hompel: There are already tons of applications that we

can implement with NarrowBand IoT – from smart key fobs to intelligent parking systems to global logistics networks. It’s a huge market opportunity – and I wouldn’t recommend missing it.

tenhompel@iml.fraunhofer.de christian.wietfeld@tu-dortmund.de

www.tu-dortmund.de www.iml.fraunhofer.de/en

Professor Christian Wietfeld

5G

is the communications standard of the future and will likely be adopted starting in 2020. It connects not just people, but an enormous number of sensors as well. This capability enables the Internet of Things. With 5G, cars, heating systems and even trash cans will become network users with entirely different needs than flesh-and-blood users.

NarrowBand IoT (NB-IoT)

Deutsche Telekom launched its first NB-IoT service packages in summer 2017 and is rapidly expanding the availability of NB-IoT networks across its footprint. In Germany, it provides a streamlined NB-IoT device connectivity package as well as a more comprehensive product connectivity package known as NB-IoT Access & Cloud of Things.

is the Chair for Communications Networks at the Technical University of Dortmund. The electrical engineer is a cellular network expert whose research interests include highly reliable communications for smart grids, e-mobility, autonomous vehicles and robotics.

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The network for a billion things5G is more than just the successor to 4G. 5G will be an extensive network that specifically addresses the demanding requirements of the Internet of Things, enabling a variety of digital scenarios.

01 Streaming 5G’s monumental data rate of up to 20 Gbps enables high-resolution, jitter-free video conferencing, ultra-HD video streaming or virtual reality for gamers – whether at home or on the go.

02 Driving Scenarios like autonomous driving require vehicles to communicate with networks, infrastructure, pedestrians and other road users. Automated driving in convoys (platooning) on highways or real-time traffic manage-ment in urban centers demand lightning-fast reactions. And 5G delivers – with response times of less than one millisecond and ‘five-nines’ availability (99.999 percent).

Soon, the innumerable smartphones and com-puters that depend on fast mobile connectivity worldwide will be joined by billions of devices in the Internet of Things: machines, cars, home ap-pliances and traffic lights. That’s why the smart,

highly flexible 5G network creates multiple logical networks over the same physical infrastructure using a technology known as “network slicing”. Each application gets exactly the kind of network performance it requires: high data rates for bandwidth-intensive applications like video streaming, low latencies for rapid-response scenarios like autonomous vehicles or high connection density to simultaneously sup-port large numbers of devices. If needed, 5G can even tap into the existing cellular network and other communication technologies like landlines, WiFi or NarrowBand IoT.

Companies and institutions are furiously researching the possibilities of 5G technology. Deutsche Telekom has taken a leading role with its 5G:haus innovation laboratory and is developing potential solutions with pre-eminent re-search and industry partners.

ILLUSTRATION Marcela Kosior

COPY Rainer Schlösser

5G VS. 4G: THE MAIN DIFFERENCES5G 4G

Download / upload 20 / 10 Gbps 300 / 150 Mbps

Latency < 1 ms 10 ms

Devices 1 million/km2 100,000/km2

Mobility Up to 500 km/h Up to 350 km/h

Availability 99.999 % 99 %

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03 Grid management Tomorrow’s cities will obtain their energy from various sources – including residents acting as distributed power producers. Managing the grid in real time will require 5G’s low latency and high availability.

04 Large events Up to a million devices can cram into a single square kilometer during big concerts, trade shows and sporting events. With 5G, every user can post pictures online and make phone calls over a stable network connection with guaranteed transmission quality. Radio communications for emergency responders and civil protection will still work perfectly.

Travel With 5G, users in high-speed trains (up to 500 km/h) and, soon, in airplanes (up to 1,000 km/h) have interrupted cellular connectivity so they can work on mobile devices during the trip.

06 Industry 4.0 Factory robots can communi-cate in real time with each other, different machines and people. Workers will rely on virtual and augmented reality at work. A 5G network can provide the necessary high availability and low latency.

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User experience – the key function of digitizationTengelmann CIO Riccardo Sperrle, in an interview with T-Systems Account Executive Sahan Köroglu, about necessary digital competence, how shopping experiences will change in the future and the advantages of do-it-yourself customizing of innovative technology solutions

INTERVIEW Thomas van Zütphen

Mr. Sperrle, in these times of rapid, accelerat-ing technological change, do you have a secret formula for digital competence?

There is no one secret formula. You see, par-ents, schools, companies – all of us – need to make something very clear early on: digital competence is part and parcel of our daily lives. We’re too quick to demonize these is-sues instead of honestly and openly educat-ing people about the risks and opportunities presented by the Internet or any other digital technology early on. The real question is, how do you manage digitization in a way that’s sensitive, but not naïve? Digital competence is absolutely essential – and it’s about more than coding software or downloading apps. It’s a question of cultivating healthy attitudes and awareness at home and school. Once we’ve reached that point, digitization will pro-vide us with lots of exciting experiences.

Apropos experience – what makes shopping a special experience for you personally?

My shopping runs tend to fall into three categories. Sometimes I need something right away. I’m in a hurry – I don’t want to spend time hunting for a parking space or discovering that what I want isn’t in the aisle or on the shelf where I expect it to be. Now if I go out to buy something I’ve researched in advance on the Internet, I’ll add a few dimensions to my search: I’ll hold it and try it out to see how it feels. And I’ll talk to an employee about the product to get more information. In the third category, I just go browsing through stores. There’s nothing specific that I need. I just want to discover

something exciting – it’s impulse shopping for entertainment. Inspiration, animation and vision are what matter most here. In each of these three categories, I expect a different kind of cus-tomer service. But if employees treat me the exact same way in all three categories, I’ll feel poorly served in at least two out of three situations. Since our communications with customers inform the overall user experience, they have to adapt – depending on whether I’m rushed or relaxed, purposeful or seeking inspiration.

How do you determine customers’ response to different types of communication?

We’re a bit skeptical about conventional psychological customer surveys. People tend to respond differently in those situations than in a “normal” conversation. That’s why we prefer to talk to custom-

ers directly, try things out, find out what works and then improve on it later. This approach lets us float a lot of trial balloons. And it’s quite easy for retail-ers like us to do. The hard part comes once we’ve found a winning solution and begin to roll it out. At that point, our biggest concerns are scalability and stability – timelines, employee training and ways to implement the solution for long-term im-pact with minimal waste.In that sense, we’re not just retailers; we’re cus-tomers, too. We ask ourselves what would annoy us if we went out on a Saturday morning to buy beverages, clothing or groceries. Maybe it’s the time we spend in line at the check-outs. Maybe it’s packing up our purchases, bringing them out to the car or hauling them home. If I’ve just bought a large, bulky household item, I may not appreciate hearing the tip, “By the way, you can rent a trailer from us.” Some customers don’t have a trailer hitch or three strong sons at home. These are the issues we look at in order to iden-tify and solve problems from the customer’s point of view.

If you’re a retailer set on being a cutting-edge innovator, how and where do you use IT to design your stores in the future?

Generally, whenever you’re dealing with base technology. For a long time, IT was viewed as a cost driver, and all the business units organized themselves into silos. There wasn’t a lot of coordi-nation. Those days are long gone. Today, if you want to create an in-store customer experience from the ground up, you need inte-grated IT and networked data. Take barcodes, for example: if we replace one of the 60,000 items in our product range, the new barcode has to be stored and readable at all the check-outs in all Ph

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FACTS & FIGURES The Tengelmann Group is an international retailer with subsidiaries such as OBI, KiK, TEDi, babymarkt.de and over 70 holdings. The group, now operated by the fifth generation of the shareholding family, does business in 20 European countries and generated 9.0 billion euros in net annual revenues in the 2016 financial year. The family business was estab-lished in Mülheim an der Ruhr in 1867 and is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

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Riccardo Serrle (58), a physicist by training, came to the

Tengelmann Group in 2011 from Media-Saturn, where he had

been the CIO.

the stores at the same time. If not, the entire process will break down. And the result? Frustrated employees, frustrated custom-ers – and suddenly we have to call in resource factor X to fix the sales process. We have to work as precisely and sustainably in our stores as pure-play online retailers do. Especially since there’s no longer any such thing as “offline-only shopping.” Without IT, many of the processes just don’t work anymore.

How do you identify technology trends and how quickly do you adopt them on over 4 million square meters of retail space worldwide?

For people like me who work in retail, shopping is a form of field research. Of course, that requires us to train ourselves to look at everything through a customer filter, not a technology one. Other-wise, we’ll quickly lose sight of the user experience. To put it an-other way, IT needs to serve our business’s interests, not the other way around. We slip into this role when we scout stores to dis-cover new trends and ask ourselves how we could make a trend work at our store, and whether our customers would accept it. And then come the big IT questions: can we build it with our archi-

tecture? Can it be operated scalably and efficiently? You can’t take everything that works in a flagship store and apply it whole-sale to other locations, brands and strategies.

Is this backwards thinking a problem?It’s a cultural problem, at least for us Germans. The Geldkarte e-cash card, personal ID cards with PINs, near-field communication for paying with cell phones – these are all ideas whose design was dictated by technology, not by the customer experience or the ben-efits to the customer. And – let’s be honest now – none of them have taken off. Successful ideas begin by asking, “How do customers perceive this? Is there a technology that could help us?” Only then do you go on to the next step: building a quick and dirty prototype in order to try out the idea.If it works, great. If not, shut it down immediately. Both experi-ences are equally valuable. These kinds of experiments can be initiated locally by a store manager or centrally by the marketing department. Both options should be possible.

So trial and error isn’t the worst method you could use?Not at all. I’m a scientist; trial and error is a basic tenet of science that involves an extremely high frustration tolerance. If I’m in a lab, 99 of 100 experiments will fail. And that’s a good thing! Anything you dream up has to stand up to scientific scrutiny. It’s a lot like evolution. Mother Nature constantly changed numerous variables a tiny bit. Whatever worked best in the real world was scaled up. In the corporate world, that means you need to experiment and try out new things with a certain frequency. Often, you’re tweaking small details that don’t immediately jump out at you. The problem is when your survival depends on a single idea. Innovation – even when it’s driving growth – is an evolutionary process that requires the IT department, in particular, to keep all these balls in the air. It has to be able to constantly support all these tiny adaptations.

When your group’s subsidiaries scout other countries, what ICT show stoppers do they find for, say, new store locations?

Network availability and connectivity – including redundant con-nectivity in many cases – are key considerations that are always tied to two big questions: a) How accessible is the country itself and b) How accessible is the actual physical location? Here’s just one ex-ample: two to four Mbps connections used to be sufficient for our

“Innovation – even when it’s driving growth – is an evolutionary process that requires the IT department to keep a lot of balls in the air.”

RICCARDO SPERRLE, Tengelmann CIO

For T-Systems Account Executive Sahan Köroglu, constant communi-cation is the only way to identify new common action areas.

Good figure: Statistical success rate for scientists performing laboratory experiments.

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check-out systems, product exchanges etc. in many locations worldwide. In the future, our connectivity requirements will rise sig-nificantly – up to tens or hundreds of Mpbs, up to fiber optic levels. It’s already happening in many areas of Germany that we serve with stores. We’re bumping up against bandwidth limits, particularly once we get away from central locations.Internationally, joint ventures or alliances like ngena are attractive alternatives. I can remember one case where we had moved into new headquarters in a particular country. We didn’t have network access yet, but were told it would be up the next day. Half a year later, we still hadn’t gotten access and ended up abandoning the site. These things happen; they’re frustrating, slow you down and rack up costs. We’ve encountered other obstacles such as differ-ences in data protection, especially outside the EU. In Russia, for example, we’re required to keep all personal data in Russia. Then you have to ask: what quality of service can I purchase for each site in order to manage my traffic if, say, video conferencing becomes important? No one is going to put up with choppy video or packet loss. Latency, bandwidth and guaranteed availability – that’s what matters. And that, too – I can’t repeat it enough – is a question of user experience. It fulfills a key function on our path to digitization.

How does Tengelmann organize the rapid integration of new applications into its IT operations, processes and customer experience?

It depends. Tengelmann doesn’t have a central corporate IT de-partment to handle everything. Our business units are fully au-tonomous with their technical expertise, and it’s important for them to have architecture-driven approaches. The main question is: what basic architecture will let me quickly swap, add and con-nect components? If your approach is “hodgepodge-driven” in-stead of architecture-driven, you’ll end up with a huge obstacle to rapid integration. Finally, you have to remember the different scales. Customer-facing applications need to be fast, flexible and entertaining. Gamification is pointless in the accounting depart-ment. But it’s great in the store. IT’s responsibility is to maintain the right balance.

Tengelmann has invested in over 70 start-ups over the years. What’s the selection process like?

Ten years ago, we put together an in-house venture capital team to evaluate what makes sense, what ideas are promising and need to be brought into the company. We were the first investors

“As far as the General Data Protection Regulation goes, I’m afraid that many

companies have underestimated the work that lies ahead of them until May 2018.”

RICCARDO SPERRLE, Tengelmann CIO

Time to change perspective. Tengelmann CIO Riccardo Sperrle believes it’s worth training yourself to view innovation through a customer filter, not a technology one.

Tengelmann, a family-owned company based in Mülheim, was established over 150 years ago as a

“colonial goods store.” Today, it’s a global corporation with operations in 20 countries.

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in Delivery Hero and are one of the biggest shareholders of Zalando. Assessing classic VC criteria has a lot to do with peo-ple and drive.

When you consider the drive, speed and casualness that start-ups often exhibit – do you just shake your head in despair? Conventional corporations tend to be more organized, structured and rule-based in how they do business.

It’s an evolution that start-ups have to go through. In the beginning, they can and should cut a couple of corners. Young entrepreneurs tend to be pretty relaxed about security, internal processes and intellectual property. As they grow, though, they have to address issues that weren’t on their radar three years previously.

Including unwieldy things like the European General Data Protection Regulation, for example?

Exactly. Our view of this particular issue is very mature and profes-sional. But there are some parts of our organization that haven’t acquired the maturity of our 150-year-old head office. They just point to their data protection officer and assume that’s enough. That’s where we come in with the necessary support and guid-ance. The GDPR will be a very interesting issue that a lot of orga-nizations are still tackling in the wrong way. I’m afraid that many companies have underestimated the work that lies ahead of them until May 2018. I think our company, however, is in a good place.

What role does security play for you?A huge role. We’re facing an opponent with a billion-euro “mar-ket,” after all. That’s why security is high up on our corporate agenda. But security has a political dimension as well. Federal governments can’t just throw up their hands and shove off all the responsibility for device, hardware and software security onto users. That’s wrong. We’re not picking up that hot potato. Why isn’t there an automatic firmware update mechanism for

routers? Household appliances have to pass an electrical safety test before going on sale. Why don’t we require something simi-lar for IT products? Manufacturers should be barred from selling any device that isn’t guaranteed to receive regular security up-dates. It’s the manufacturers’ responsibility, not the users’. We need to demand more action from the EU, the federal govern-ment and, last but not least, Bitkom, Germany’s leading IT in-dustry association.At the same time, we need to foster awareness. For us, that in-cludes securing everything that has an IP address and provides network access – for example, candy or coffee vending machines that accept chip cards as payment and are relatively easy to hack.Another thing: security ought to be completely foolproof out of the box. If we get customer e-mails with attachments, for exam-ple, the system needs to make sure that the attachment is safe. How is someone in the complaints department supposed to make that call? We need schemes and technologies that support system security.

“Security ought to be completely foolproof out of the box.” RICCARDO SPERRLE, Tengelmann CIO

To never lose sight of the user experience, Tengelmann CIO Riccardo Sperrle believes IT needs “to serve

our business’s interests, not the other way around.”

sahan.koeroglu@t-systems.com www. tengelmann.de/en

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Mr. Kremer, the corporate IT world is investing more energy in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) than in any other issue right now. Is that justifi ed? Yes and no. ‘No’ if we’re talking about knee-jerk reactions to new data protection legislation. If an organization has only just realized that it urgently needs to comply with this new law before it takes effect next May, it will struggle to execute a viable response. A clear ‘yes’ if we’re talking about aligning your digitization strategy with the GDPR. That’s a much better approach, in my view.

How so?Just consider the technology: digitization is and remains driven by the cloud, which is essentially middleware for transformation. Without this foundation, you won’t be able to even get close to implementing industrial IoT scenarios, for example. All the transactions run through the cloud – including a lot of the personal data that the GDPR targets. That’s why this foundation needs to be not only as technologically stable as possible, but also technologically state-of-the-art. And that should be empha-sized much more in the GDPR debate.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enters into force in May 2018.Dr. Thomas Kremer, Member of the Board of Management of Deutsche Telekom, on how “privacy by design” can address the dramatic repercussions of the GDPR

for organizations and the best way to handle personal data in the future.

Data Protection Regulation: Digital strategy instead of knee-jerk reaction

So what do you recommend?Clearly, the IT structures that organizations are now putting in place for digitization will dictate their trajectory for years to come. That’s why I advocate “privacy by design.” It doesn’t make any sense to implement, then readjust.

What do you mean?The old approach was to provide the IT fi rst, then program data protection functions around that IT. Today, responsible organi-zations demand legal compliance from the start. Essential security standards and data protection mechanisms should preferably be implemented from the very fi rst second of a new project. There should be detailed documentation on how exactly data protection standards were met. And it’s no stretch to say that this is baked into every one of our solutions – as demonstrated by multiple recognized standards and certifi ca-tions. Organizations who go with us are guaranteed to be on the safe side.

And if they don’t?…they’d have to go to great lengths to prove that their IT complies with data protection laws, for example. That’s no small thing. Remember: connectivity, databases, sensors and devices in an IoT setting, the services running on them, the downstream applications, the users and the customers – that’s all based on digitization in the cloud. And so it would be a mistake to choose anything but privacy by design.

frank.wagner@telekom.de www.t-systems.com/gdpr

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Germany’s network expansion will do more than spawn new applications. Networks will develop intelligence of their own.

By contrast, Kevin Parikh, a digitization expert, has rather unconventional ideas about how this new

digital brain can be leveraged for everyone‘s benefi t.

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Digitization is more than just a technological phe-nomenon. Kevin Parikh remembers the social aspect, too. He believes that digital singularity will be good for people. After all, he knows how it works. “Rather than spending time on mun-

dane everyday formalities, like driving to the bank or grocery store, wouldn’t you prefer to have more time for your spouse or children?”

“Well, yes.” Parikh‘s questions elicit automatic nods from his listeners. The futurist and thought leader explains quickly and clearly why artificial intelligence and machine learning will be good for mankind. When you talk to him about the digital future, you immediately want to be part of it.

Digital singularity is the point where technology and the human experience converge. By that, researchers mean the moment when artificial intelligence has ad-vanced to the point where it improves in an ever-accelerat-ing spiral and becomes a superbrain itself. It‘s one of the buzzwords in the business.

As recently as in February of this year, at the World Gov-ernment Summit in Dubai, Tesla founder Elon Musk held a powerful speech warning his audience about this trend: “We humans need to become cyborgs with artificial and biological intelligence tools to avoid becoming the ‘house cats’ of vastly more intelligent AI.” He also claims that many jobs will be destroyed or taken over by robots. However, they wouldn’t do a better job than humans.

Parikh does not believe in this grim scenario. “Artificial intelligence will empower humankind, not destroy it.” He sees himself in the vein of futurist Ray Kurzweil, who coined the term “technical singularity” and founded Singularity University.

It is his analytical, yet all-embracing view of people’s questions and fears that inspires trust. He is writing a book on the topic of digital singularity that focuses on “a case for humanity”. He explains, “My grandfather used to hide his money in the wall, under the wallpaper. He didn’t trust banks.” And today? Online banking is used by virtually ev-eryone. When the telephone was invented 150 years ago, people feared that it would just lure office workers into wasting time. And today, do you know of anyone who still works without the Internet? There may be a time in the fu-ture when, similarly, it’s nearly impossible to get by without

a digital twin, a digital doppelgänger which manages and monitors all your personal data online.

Parikh, a lawyer and economist, kicked off his consult-ing career in Bill Clinton’s government team in the late 1990s. As the husband and father remembers, “Even back then, I was calming people’s fears about digital communications.”

Now, he organizes digital transformation processes – often quite innovative ones. He is convinced that “if you don’t use the new technologies for your business, you won’t survive.” In the US, nearly all the ‘old economy’ com-panies have successfully digitized their business models. “Everything is pointing toward maximum integration of data technologies.” For example, Avasant, the leading man-agement consulting firm founded by Kevin in 2006, re-cently designed a system that collects and analyzes data on travelers and airlines for an airport operator. A virtual coach welcomes travelers at the terminal and accompa-nies them to their seats on the plane. “That provides much more security for everyone,” Parikh promises.

His theory of socially and economically compatible digitization strikes a balance between multiple poles: hyper convergence tightly integrates devices, platforms, software and users. “This produces entirely new digital moments,” Parikh explains. With the help of a digital twin, all personal data can be managed and monitored online. Parikh prom-ises that “our digital twin will think like us and act exclu-sively in our interest.” Our digital twin takes care of financial transactions and signs insurance applications. It even handles our estate after its flesh-and-blood twin passes away. Augmented reality lets people see things in much greater detail and complexity. Transboundary communities form, connecting people on the basis of their personal and professional commonalities. This approach can perfect the Customer First strategy, too. “Companies will align them-selves with the end of the value chain.” In the future, only the customer will decide what a product should look like and what it should be able to do based on their prefer-ences,” said Parikh. And it’s all possible thanks to 3D print-ing and similar methods.

bestpractice@t-sytems.com www.t-systems.com/digital-transformation

COPY Anja Steinbuch

BIOKevin S. Parikh is a noted expert and thought leader on digital and business transfor-mation in the United States. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from the University of California and his Juris Doctor from American University. In his career, the US citizen has worked for consulting outfits KPMG and Gartner. Today, Parikh is Global CEO and Senior Partner at Avasant, an international sourcing expert. Parikh lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

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Plato himself said: “I love the Internet!”

Silicon Valley has always been a kind of spiritual melting pot. Built on the foundations of ‘60s counterculture, it has inherited an aura of starry-eyed idealism. It celebrates the revolu-tionary, the nerdy, the staunchly eccentric: from

yoga and Zen Buddhism to veganism and transhumanism. Here, technology is widely viewed as a path to self-actual-ization. Many things now considered integral to our culture initially took root in the fertile soil of hippie communes. In 1968, for example, activist Steward Brand published the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, containing product reviews of early synthesizers and personal computers as well as alternative energy production methods such as wind and solar power. Steve Jobs called the catalog a pa-perback version of Internet search engines. It brought the personal computer to hippies, who celebrated it, like LSD, as a technology to expand your mind.

Outside spirituality, digital pioneers have discovered an abiding interest in something else, too: philosophy. Companies seek advice from “chief philosophy officers” like Andrew Taggart, who preaches the gospel of self-ex-amination to tech elites. “Philosophers arrive on the scene at the moment when bullshit can no longer be tolerated.” “And there’s plenty of it in Silicon Valley,” says Taggart, cit-ing the rise of growth hackers and programming “ninjas,” for example. Budding programmers at Stanford University take classes on the impact of cognitive science, philosophy and psychology on computing and artificial intelligence. Humanities scholars are now hailed as the future of techni-cal innovation, a debate the venture capitalist Scott Hartley kicked off earlier this year with his book, “The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World.” In the future, new jobs will demand philosophical skills, particularly in the development of artificial intelligence.

Technology elites are rediscovering ancient philosophers. Why is that?

COPY Eva Book

LEAP IN TIME Rebecca Newberger

Goldstein: “Plato at the Googleplex. Why Philosophy Won’t Go

Away”Atlantic Books

ISBN: 978-1-78239-559-1

Her protagonist, Plato, pioneered the dialog as an

alternative to the classic treatise. This approach leads philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein to surprising conclusions 2,500

years later.

Futurists like Ray Kurzweil are ultimately philosophers. And as technology fuses more and more with man, we will ur-gently need critical intellectuals like Evgeny Morozov.

Silicon Valley’s true philosophical love is Stoicism. Digi-tal start-ups pursue the very same virtues espoused by Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius: justice, temper-ance, courage, wisdom and, most importantly, self-disci-pline. Their credo is now “Omnia mea mecum sunt” (All of my things are with me). However, instead of exploring Sto-icism’s nuanced interplay of logic, ethics, physics and cos-mos, the emphasis is on bite-sized tidbits of wisdom aimed at self-improvement. Some are served up by Ryan Holiday, an author and former American Apparel marketing man-ager. Book titles like “Ego is the Enemy” and “The Obstacle Is the Way” make plain this neo-Stoicist’s pop philosophy of self-discovery. On Twitter and Instagram, hundreds of thou-sands of followers get prettily packaged pointers on man-aging stress in the digital world: “To resist is not mere folly, but madness.”

For those experts who see philosophy as not simple self-reflection, but a critical world view, this philosophical renaissance is an opportunity to explore the ways in which the ancient teachings dovetail with 21st century life. One such thinker is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who earned a PhD in philosophy at Princeton University. In her latest book, “Plato at the Googleplex – Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away,” she sends Plato on a journey through modern-day North America and asks readers to join her in a thought experiment: What would happen if Plato could see today’s society? If he could Google questions instead of thinking about them? And what happens when knowledge can be crowdsourced?

The 2,400-year-old Greek thinker’s ancient arguments collide with today’s everyday life. Goldstein, who borrows

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Plato’s technique of packaging messages in dialogs, con-fronts the ancient philosopher with contemporary charac-ters like a Google programmer, a talk show host and a neuroscientist. Plato comes to the neuroscientist, Dr. David Shoket, for an MRI scan of his brain. The fi ctional Shoket argues that science eclipsed philosophy long ago. Philoso-phy is incapable of revealing the kind of insights that data-based knowledge provides, he claims. “‘Philosophical data’ is as oxymoronic as ‘military intelligence’ or ‘airplane food.’” On the examination table, Plato tries to convince the neuroscientist that science alone cannot answer questions about consciousness, free will and morality. Shoket dis-agrees: “Science is like a sewage treatment plant. Scien-tists take the philosophical bullshit and reprocess it into knowledge.”

At fi rst, Goldstein’s Plato encounters objections to his philosophical teachings in the here and now. However, the philosopher deconstructs the opposing arguments so completely that nothing remains – except facts and good will. Truth must be sought elsewhere. Nonetheless, Plato, who adores e-learning and constantly has his Google Chromebook nearby, says, “I love the Internet.” That’s no surprise – in ancient Athens, he believed that knowledge should be available to everyone, not just the elites. The digi-tal age provides access for all. Everyone gets a voice.

However, access has a dark side, too: fake news, echo chambers and voter microtargeting. And that may even overwhelm the Silicon Valley people who unleashed this fl ood of data in the fi rst place. A disillusioned world in which Donald Trump is the US president gives us the impe-tus to look inward, analyze our inner self and improve it with a little philosophical support. After all, the ancient Stoics focused more on enduring the world than changing it. To-day, after many believed that science had rendered philos-ophy obsolete, the tide appears to be turning. If Silicon Valley engages in thought experiments like Goldstein’s, it will recognize that technology has nowhere near as many answers as expected. And that it may be time to take a closer, deeper look at a thing or two.

bestpractice@t-systems.com

Fictional dialog between neuroscientist Dr. Shoket and his graduate student, Agatha, from “Plato at the

Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won’t Go Away” by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

It’s Plato, the famous philoso-pher. I read him in college. You must have read him yourself at some point.

AGATHA

That’s his Chromebook over there. He’s done his research, and he’s eager to learn more. And, as I said, he’s a famous philosopher.

AGATHA

As far as I know. I don’t think it’s something a person can stop being.

AGATHA

Of course.

AGATHA

You could ask Plato that.

AGATHA

We have philosophers of mind at the Cognitive Science Center. They collaborate with us.

AGATHA smiles

He’ll be able to follow directions?

SHOKET

You mean he’s still a philosopher?

SHOKET

What’s the point?

SHOKET

I didn’t even know there were still philosophers around. They have them on the faculty here?

SHOKET

Right. I’m going to ask a two-thousand-year-old man to tell me something I don’t know.

SHOKET

Live and learn. Do they share the same building with the astrologers and the alchemists?

SHOKET whistles contemplatively

SHOKET laughs

Gesundheit Nordhessen

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Hospitals that outsource their IT infrastructure re-main the exception, not the rule. In fact, only 20 percent of institutions use cloud services, ac-cording to a survey by i-Solutions Health GmbH.

One reason for this low level is the stubborn fear that the cloud may not be secure enough to hold highly sensitive patient data. Nonsense, says Dr. Henning Janßen, CIO of Gesundheit Nordhessen: “Hospital IT has been asked to do more and more in recent years, and that’s hard to do in-house. We’re positive that a seasoned partner like Deutsche Telekom is better able to operate our IT securely and stably than we are.”

COMPLETE WAN AND LAN OVERHAULTo put Gesundheit Nordhessen’s subsidiaries in a perfect position for their system environment to transition to the cloud, Deutsche Telekom first overhauled the group’s wide area network (WAN). Four hospitals, physical rehabilitation centers and retirement communities at nine different loca-tions are now connected to the WAN and to each other. The IT experts thoroughly modernized the local area networks (LANs) as well. To ensure maximum reliability, all central

Stable and secure: hospital IT in a private cloud

As digitization takes off, even hospitals are relying more and more on smooth, reliable IT hosting. Gesundheit Nordhessen Holding AG, a company of nearly 4,800 employees that operates healthcare organizations, now sources all its IT resources from Deutsche Telekom’s Dynamic Healthcare Center (DHC).

components were set up redundantly. For its Kassel head-quarters, Gesundheit Nordhessen took one more step, put-ting Deutsche Telekom in charge of updating and operating the Wifi infrastructure used by employees, patients and even some medical equipment.

MOVING TO THE PRIVATE CLOUDNext, Deutsche Telekom had to relocate the data center infrastructure to its Dynamic Healthcare Center (DHC). That involved shifting around 100 servers along with all the basic services, including email, file, print and services, to the cloud. Finally, the project concluded by migrating the users and hospital applications to Deutsche Telekom’s platform – a move that the company performed largely on its own. “However, our team stood by to advise and assist Gesundheit Nordhessen – and remains on hand today,” said Stephan Paulicks, Project Manager at T-Systems. “Our help was particularly needed to incorporate and im-plement new requirements and change requests in the course of the project.”

Today, Gesundheit Nordhessen obtains all its IT re-sources from the DHC. While Deutsche Telekom handles data center operations and the network and security infra-structure, the healthcare company’s IT team looks after users and internal processes. “Now that we’ve put experts in charge of operating our IT infrastructure, our staff can spend less time and energy on routine administration and devote more attention to helping users,” said Janßen.

COPY Silke Kilz

At Gesundheit Nordhessen, nurses and physicians enjoy smoother processes and significantly reduced system downtime.

Knut.Dietrich-Thiel@t-systems.com www.t-systems.com/health/dhc

www.t-systems.com/solutions/cloud-security

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The first set of IT applications has been estab-lished at LEAG in a 1-to-1 transition, accom-panied by the roll-out of a comprehensive IT service management system. Other services and applications will be migrated by October

2018 and supported in ServiceNow, the ITSM system. Al-though LEAG is traditionally a mine and power plant oper-ator, its digital transformation has been sending out the kinds of signals that typify more “future-oriented” busi-nesses. From the moment the digital change process kicked off, LEAG’s decision makers made one thing clear: they wanted to do things right and completely mod-ernize the company while giving employees the best pos-sible service experience. Management advanced this vi-sion by devoting plenty of attention to it and leading the way with supportive initiatives. “We want to enshrine digi-tization as a core value in the new LEAG’s DNA, right alongside safety and reliability,” said Sven Maaß, Head of IT Infrastructure at LEAG. “After all, our company has to

When the pit goes digital Since splitting off from Swedish power company Vattenfall, LEAG, Germany’s fourth largest energy supplier, has been working full steam to build its own IT infrastructure by October 2018. One year in, it has reached the halfway mark – right on schedule.

fulfill its public service obligation. There’s an art to recon-ciling the legal requirements with the technical possibili-ties. But it’s definitely worth the effort.”

Having conceived of a vision, LEAG put out a call for tenders for a provider of infrastructure-as-a-service and another call for a solution to digitally support all the IT ser-vice management processes. In the end, the nod went to T-Systems, as the ICT partner, and operational services (OS), the T-Systems subsidiary that operated the ITSM so-lution that held the most appeal for LEAG: ServiceNow, the only tool to offer a diverse menu of features. And that impressed the decision-makers. “ServiceNow feels like a ‘do-everything’ platform. We haven’t even begun to tap its full potential,” continued Maaß. With the automated IT platform solution, service processes will run almost en-tirely on their own. That’s important for efficiency reasons, too: the energy market is under pressure; competition is rising. New approaches and leaner processes are needed to remain competitive.

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With ServiceNow, incident, problem and change man-agement is quick, simple, secure and reliable. It stream-lines activities in the IT back office by automating standard processes and freeing up more time for employees to de-vote to their core business. In addition, it serves as the cen-tral ordering, organization and interaction platform for all the company’s departments. An employee needs a laptop with a dust cover? No problem: she just has to select the product from a preconfigured service catalog on the self-service portal and place the order with a mouse click. Like any online order placed at home, she can track her new computer’s shipping status right up to delivery. Or what happens if an employee’s PC starts malfunctioning? An er-ror report is immediately submitted, processed and an-swered with an acknowledgment when the error is fixed.

At its headquarters in Cottbus, LEAG manages power plant and lignite businesses that generated EUR 3.4 billion in revenue in 2016.

The solution supports HR, too. From questions about paychecks and training courses to orders for protective clothing or health check-ups, all requests are automatically routed through the platform to a speedy resolution. Pro-cesses will be fast, in contrast to the old paper-based sys-tem in which documents such as parental leave requests were manually carried from one desk to the next. Being a cloud service (SaaS/PaaS), OS’s ServiceNow supports real-time document editing and sharing so that all employ-ees have access to the latest data right away without having to worry about obsolete versions. “There’s another benefit, too. The tool is so smart and intuitive that employees need very little training. They can start using all the time-saving features right away,” said Maaß. All LEAG employees – around 8,000 in total – will have access to the user-friendly services. Data protection is guaranteed. Since LEAG is sub-ject to the German IT Security Act for Critical Infrastruc-tures, one of its top priorities is to store data in the kind of German data centers that T-Systems and OS operate.

To implement such a sophisticated system on a tight schedule, functions are installed out of the box, one step at a time. Maaß explained, “We prioritized the must-haves and the nice-to-haves in order to keep LEAG’s business running first of all. OS, following my own favorite motto, ‘Keep IT simple’, helped us reduce complexity to the bare essentials that we could handle and thoroughly familiarized us with the solution through workshops. Next, we plan to start pick-ing all the other flowers that ServiceNow offers just off the beaten path.”

For example, the partners plan to give the blue-collar workers digging in the pit access to the new platform solu-tion through local terminals. Field support staff will also be issued mobile devices so service units can immediately see and respond to new orders wherever they may be.

“ServiceNow provides everything-as-a-service – but you don’t have to implement everything from the begin-ning. Instead, you start with one use case, flexibly develop the next one and make adjustments along the way. Noth-ing’s chiseled in stone. That way, employees see that their input is valued and considered, too,” said Dr. Ulrich Müller, Managing Director of operational services (OS). “LEAG is evolving from a demand-focused to a delivery-focused or-ganization at full speed and is tackling this challenge beau-tifully. When IT and operations move closer together like this and the processes are integrated intelligently, digital transformation can become an energy field for success.”

Olaf.Reimann@o-s.de www.leag.de/en

www.t-systems.com/solutions/service-now www.t-systems.com/digital-transformation

ABOUT OPERATIONAL SERVICESOS is one of Germany’s leading ICT service providers for data center operations, network op-erations and application host-ing. Its ICT experts and sea-soned consultants design, sup-port and manage outsourcing projects throughout the entire project lifecycle, leveraging specific expertise from a broad range of industries.At highly available, highly secure data centers located at nine sites throughout Germany, OS hosts central and local stan-dard and custom applications, network and other operating environments and secure cloud solutions.

Vattenfall’s spin-off turned into LEAG – a new corporate brand comprising

Lausitz Energie Bergbau AG and Lausitz Energie Kraftwerke AG.

For more information:

Winning with customers

Tomio Pihkala, KONE CTO, and Serge Vandenhoudt, T-Systems VP Sales & Service Management EMEA, on innovations

close to the customer, learning to trust in partnerships, and IT solutions with a “Wow!” factor.

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KONE

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Mr. Pihkala, the world’s cities are constantly growing and approxi-mately 200,000 people move into urban centers every day. Urbaniza-tion is increasing and more than half of the planet’s population lives in urban areas. What role does the KONE Technology and Innovation unit play in your corporation’s busi-ness model and the desire to set benchmarks for the “people flow of the future?”

Tomio Pihkala: Traditionally KONE Tech-nology and Innovation has been very much focused on how to improve cur-rent businesses through innovations. But today we see new business mod-els emerging which further help us to increase our revenue in addition to the current businesses. So today we are doing both. The function that I’m lead-ing is responsible for innovation gen-eration, in particular innovations close to the customer. That means coming up with an idea that we can translate into value and that customers are willing to pay for. As a company we want to set benchmarks and be known for the best People Flow experience.

What characterizes the best people flow in modern cities? Tomio Pihkala: We think it’s an experience that can be easy and smooth

but effective, productive and fast at the same time. And if you achieve this combination it leaves an emotional impression with the customer which really creates that “Wow!” effect. We want to be known as a great company that works really close to its customers and co-creates new services and solutions together with them. This is a big change for us as we generally used to do everything in our laboratory. This is the best way to guarantee that the value that we are trying to create through new services and solutions is really what customers want and are willing to pay for.

Can you give us an example for the new business models you mentioned?

Tomio Pihkala: Probably the best example is the 24/7 Connected Services offering that we launched in February. It enables us to connect some 1.1 million elevators in our maintenance globally and it is actually one of the

INTERVIEW Thomas van Zütphen

first ever IoT-based offerings in our industry. The great thing about this service is that we can predict the condition of the elevator or escalator and that way help our customers manage their properties and assets over their life-cycle in a much better way. It creates full visibility for our customers into the condition of elevators and escalators within their or-ganization. This transparency and clarity matters a lot for facility manag-

ers who are responsible for looking after buildings. And that’s where we can help them solve their problems and keep their tenants happy. The 24/7 Connected Ser-vices gives them the peace of mind of be-ing alerted to issues before they can become noticeable to the tenants and of being in full control of their business.

Why did you launch 24/7 Connected Services? What were the drivers?Tomio Pihkala: Our strategy, “Winning with customers,” means we put the cus-tomer at the center of everything we do. We are becoming a much more customer-centric company. For example: How can you minimize time spent on admin work so that sales people can spend more time with their customer at the site? That obvi-ously means that we can increase activity and can do things smarter. I think con-necting people, connecting equipment, connecting customers – all that will help us to improve our operational efficiency. The key point is really how we can help our KONE people to perform the best and serve our customers better.

How did you identify all the necessary technologies and how long will it take to tie them all up?

Tomio Pihkala: That’s where we hit the crossroads of IoT real-time data and mobility, so to speak. And KONE is not the company whose mis-sion is to develop IoT. For us it was important to identify world-class partners who have great expertise in technology areas when it comes

“As a company we want to set benchmarks and be known for the

best people flow experience.”

TOMIO PIHKALA, CTO KONE Corporation

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to IoT, artificial intelligence, analytics and so on. That’s the key to how we started our journey.

Given that there are a lot of potential partners in different fields, how did you make your choice?

Tomio Pihkala: If you really just look at world-class companies, there are only a few. Just talking about IoT – this is an area which has developed and progressed a lot in the past few years, and there are a lot of com-panies that can offer IoT platforms. But very few have invested in and developed an offering in a comprehensive manner. IBM is an example of another partner which is clearly a leader in IoT and cognitive analyt-ics. So at the end of the day it was not that difficult for us to identify those who could really help us – in particular on a global scale.

But isn’t such an approach also a question of checking numerous proofs of concepts in different areas for digitization – talking about VR, AR, AI – after all your ambition needs to answer the question: How will the end-user benefit from it? You don’t want to be taken in by use cases that turn out to be nice to have but don’t contribute to your business case?

Tomio Pihkala: Absolutely. It’s been a journey of investigation. Where does something make sense and where does it not. Technology itself will not solve our challenges. You need a partner who reliably understands both, our industry and our business, so he can create solutions that re-ally address the key values that we are after. That requires investments,

In his regular talks with Serge Vandenhoudt (r.)

Tomio Pihkala has amazing figures to offer: every day, more people use a KONE

transportation system than a Volkswagen or a Toyota. It

takes KONE elevators and escalators around this

planet just one week to move 7 billion people, the

Earth’s total population.

“At the end of the day it was not difficult for us to identify those who could really help us on a global scale.”TOMIO PIHKALA, CTO KONE Corporation

a lot of competent people. And of course that applies to ourselves as much as it does to our potential partner.

It seems like KONE’s starting point was looking at the value for the end-users in terms of “win with customers.” But gradually the strat-egy has shifted to incorporate “win with partners”. Has that be-come a real strength of KONE?

Tomio Pihkala: I’d say yes. We nowadays have a real partnership ecosys-tem. That means that there are multiple partners with whom KONE is building an underlying digital platform that might be related to IoT de-

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For Tomio Pikhkala it‘s for sure, that the personalization of every usage of elevators and escalators will be the

next big thing for the whole industry.

It is easy to create one proof of concept or a demo for AR. But isn’t it much harder to create something that really suits daily business? For instance, you have to make sure that there is a lot of documen-tation available for an AR application if you want to implement it for more than a million elevators. Then you need to have a massive amount of administration behind it in order to get it implemented.

Tomio Pihkala: That’s a big roadmap. But the future eventually will go in that direction. And the question is, what to do first. But the eventual benefits will be some low hanging fruit. Nevertheless these are chances to help our field people to perform the best. So we are doing some pilots, for training purposes, we are learning and we absolutely keep an eye on that. When it comes to virtual reality we obviously already use VR to simulate people flows in buildings that don’t exist yet. That makes our designing and engineering much easier.

Speaking of rolling out the solution, what is the next challenge? Tomio Pihkala: Well, it’s not just about bringing our over 20,000 service

technicians more tools and expertise. Just consider that on average service is responsible for 45 percent of our revenue. It’s about our teams being able to help customers more, solve their problems and be in tune with their needs. The same goes for our installation supervisors and sales managers. There is a lot of admin work behind the scenes as well, where we can become more efficient.

In general, in cities like New York, Shanghai or London, people spend years of their working lifetime either waiting for elevators or traveling in elevators or escalators. How is KONE promising to change that for the future?

Tomio Pihkala: The speed of elevators and their interaction among them-selves is one thing. The other thing is: To turn a waste of time into a benefit. It’s not all about waiting. It’s also about cash flow. If you look at retail buildings for example – if consumers are not able to spend time in the shops you are literally losing money. The more we are able to move people to the upper floors the more they are spending money. So whether it’s about work efficiency or shopping trips – there is a direct correlation with the money flow.

What is the significance of security for global-scale enterprise mobility manage-ment like the kind you will be relying on? Tomio Pihkala: In particular, cyber security is a very important topic in the IoT space as everything from back end to front end needs to be secure. The whole IT infrastructure needs to be properly designed and managed. That’s not just a question of technology but also a question of competencies. When a company is moving into the digital world it in-stantaneously needs to update its operating model to address their cyber security. That’s why we built a cyber security strategy for KONE so we can really address this chal-lenge in a holistic manner.

After choosing your partners, how do you manage them? Tomio Pihkala: That’s a good question and there is no single answer to that. When we de-cided to take digitization seriously we knew that we needed to invest management time to

help technicians to solve the problems they encounter. That’s, for exam-ple, where artificial intelligence enters the picture and will develop this capability further in the future. These are things that we need to offer our people. In the future, just consider the 5G networks, this will be much more instan tane ous, much more contextual. Robots as well are going to play a major role and help techni-cians solve a problem by using multiple data sources which are available. I think in this journey we are still at the beginning.

What you didn’t mention so far is AR. How relevant will augmented reality be for your business in the future?

Tomio Pihkala: AR is one of the user inter-faces which can be applied in the future. It will create an advantage because techni-cians can combine physical and virtual reality. As a result, services can be hands free and much more contextual. That is an exciting area that requires very good product data management, where all of the infrastructure and IT need to be in a good place and coordinated perfectly.

vices, to analytics, to cyber security or any-thing else. Then you have a platform where you can start developing applications on top. We make it attractive for various companies to join us and innovate together. Of course, in this ecosystem big technology partners are key enablers.

How do your field service technicians get their information from the IoT platform? Tomio Pihkala: If you think about the con-nected world where we get more data from IoT, we of course want to use that to help our field people. So it is clear that we need a mo-bile application that, for example, the techni-cians can use to get information about customers, projects or equipment, which per-son is going to visit and serve what destina-tion, but also information about potential incidents, call-outs or any kind of changes a project has had. Not to forget the help you need to navigate to the right address. Thanks to modern technology we are able to really

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build these relationships with the key companies. Starting from our CEO we have spent much, much more time than in the past to develop strong partnerships. Because partnership is a learning process for everybody. We learned to trust, for instance. Especially when we want to solve a problem, we need to depend on relationship and trust.

What’s been your trigger to implement partnership development more broadly to coordinate the work with your partners?

Tomio Pihkala: This step forces our partners into a lot of discussions among each other on a strategic level. That makes them always con-sider the question, “How can KONE win from the cooperation of its partners?” In this moment you start to approach problems more from a solutions perspective than as a competitor. If you look at start-up com-panies, there is a different kind of treatment and culture compared to bigger companies. It’s our job to create a kind of team spirit in the eco-system. And to be honest – in the area of digitization you need to work with almost everybody. We have seen a lot of positive outcomes from this open approach.

KONE is using an IBM Watson IoT cloud, a Salesforce Service Cloud and a T-Systems cloud to manage all of its global business opera-tions through a central SAP system. What are the major benefits and challenges of this construction?

Tomio Pihkala: It is an overall trend that nearly all services are moving from closed-shop data centers to the cloud. It’ll make us more agile and

faster because the cloud has a lot of benefits. But since this is some-thing we are not going to do on our own, it all comes down to choosing the right partners. In any case, you need to be pretty good at integrat-ing different cloud services. That is why we have been looking for an integration platform which makes it easier to implement updates and keep up with new releases. In this area, like in many, our ecosystem of partners again enhances our position to harvest the best of all worlds of cloud services that our different partners offer.

What’s going to be the next big thing for solutions in the elevator and escalator industry?

Tomio Pihkala: In the future our customers and end-users will enjoy a great personalization of our people flow. It’s going to be much more contextual. It’ll become perfectly normal for a building to know who’s going to enter which elevator and to gain access to the necessary data to know where you are heading, what you care about and what kind of information, news or entertainment you want. In this way the short trip in an elevator will make life even easier and more enjoyable and will add to people’s happiness and comfort in small effective doses. And that’s a matter of connectivity, sensors and networks. In other words: a matter of IT.

Serge.Vandenhoudt@t-systems.com www.kone.com

www.t-systems.com/solutions/iot

52,000

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450,000

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items of equipment in service

net sales

customers worldwide; Forbes has listed KONE

as one of the world’s top 100 innovative companies.

FACTS & FIGURESFounded in 1910, KONE is now one of the largest manufacturers of elevators and escalators worldwide.

The declared mission of the Helsinki- based company is to improve the flow of urban life and to deliver the best people flow experience. To achieve that, T-Systems and KONE will combine their unique strengths to accelerate Internet of things (IoT) connectivity for the elevator and escalator markets. Sensors in the ele vators measure speed, humidity and acceleration. They then collect this data and other information. The remote monitoring gateways link the sensors to an IoT platform and enable KONE not only to provide predictive maintenance for the elevators, but will also offer a range of completely new services based on the sensor data. Furthermore, the Deutsche Telekom subsidiary has been running all of KONE’s Data Center Opera-tions, SAP landscape and services for its workstation systems around the world in a T-Systems cloud since 2013.

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Digitization is a major challenge facing all of society, including churches and the public sector. That’s why institutions in these areas have taken concrete action to set themselves up for a successful digital future. The inspiring examples set by the rbb public broadcasting corporation, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria and the Bavarian State Ministry for Finance, Regional Development and Home Affairs show that the public sector is making great strides in digitization.

COPY Roger Homrich

Parliamentary elections: an exciting time for jour-nalists, a challenge for television broadcasters’ IT departments. All across the country, news desks provide minute-by-minute coverage of the reactions of politicians, parties and ordi-

nary people to the election results. With live reports from campaign headquarters, voter interviews from Flensburg to Berchtesgaden, and initial projections at 6 pm, news or-ganizations have to run like well-oiled machines. Break-downs are unacceptable. That also goes for the website operated by the rbb public broadcasting corporation, which visitors tend to fl ood on election days or during breaking news events. In the past, bottlenecks used to be-devil rbb’s online presence. The servers and leased line just couldn’t handle the onslaught of visitors.

Add servers and bandwidth or move to the cloud? For rbb, the answer was clear: it embraced the cloud. Today, the broadcaster uses scalable IT resources from the Open Telekom Cloud (OTC), Deutsche Telekom’s public cloud service. The benefi ts are hard to beat: on-demand access to computing resources in the cloud. If website hits spike, the cloud automatically activates additional resources to absorb the deluge of traffi c. Once visitor numbers normal-ize again, the add-on computing resources are deacti-vated. That means rbb doesn’t have to maintain costly servers for the occasional surge of visitors, but only pays for what it uses. The Open Telekom Cloud also satisfi es Ger-many’s strict data security and data protection require-ments – a must-have for rbb.

When its news pages became overloaded during breaking news events, Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb) decided to move its Internet presence into the cloud. Today, the broadcaster’s websites are always available, even during high traffi c periods.

A webcache holds copies of rbb’s ten most important news sites: from rbb Online to Inforadio and Kulturradio all the way to Antenne Brandenburg or Radio Fritz. Every ten seconds, the system updates the cached copies. All Inter-net requests end up here. The webcache in the OTC acts as a kind of shock absorber for excess traffi c. That helps keep rbb’s websites online all the time, even during breaking news. The broadcaster only has to pay for outgoing data traffi c and the computing and storage resources that it ac-tually consumes. Even rbb’s page for “Little Sandman” bedtime stories is now hosted in the cloud, accessible to millions of families throughout Germany – so the Little Sandman never has to go to bed early.

martin.grether@t-systems.com www.t-systems.com/open-telekom-cloud

Bedtime stories from the public cloud

The rbb websites have to handle a large number of visitors, especially during live broadcasts of major events.

Step by step to a digital future

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When help is a blessingA big part of being a pastor is talking and ministering to congregation members. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria has rolled out digital solutions to help pastors look after their flocks.

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The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Bavaria has taken digital steps to help pastors tend to their flocks. Pastors, after all, “dedicate themselves like no other occupation to people, with all their hopes, fears, worries and value systems at every

stage of life,” according to the official education portal of Saxony, Bavaria’s immediate neighbor to the northeast. Like every profession, clergy members have to juggle administra-tive activities. However, many tasks can be done on smart-phones and mobile devices. First, though, the rectories and pastors serving Bavaria’s 1,500-plus Lutheran congregations need constant mobile access to emails, calendars or congre-gation contact details as well as documents on the state church’s intranet.

To make this vision a reality, T-Systems put together a mo-bility package that reduces the clerics’ workload. It supports every step involved in procuring new phones – from the initial order to the roll-out to handset lifecycle management – replacing defective devices and operating the central enter-prise mobility management solution, including a help desk. That frees up the church’s information center to focus on pro-viding the IT infrastructure and IT services needed to keep the church running.

Since mid-2017, the pastors have been able to pick their work smartphones from an electronic catalog. T-Systems technicians then fully prepare the chosen device by installing a SIM card with an appropriate cellular plan, backing up the data and shipping it to the pastor. Once the shipment arrives, clergy members merely have to open the box, pull out the smartphone and switch it on. It’s ready to go right away. The smartphones can support every type of church ministry since confidential data is specially protected and fully segregated from less secure areas of memory. The whole process is re-markably painless for pastors.

The church picked this package largely on data protec-tion grounds. Pastors often handle very sensitive data about members of their congregations: contact details, appoint-ments or emails about deaths, marital problems or pre-baptis-mal meetings. This information mustn’t fall into the wrong hands. That’s why all the sensitive data relating to ministry work is locked away in a secure container on the smartphone. Security is assured even if pastors lose their phones since T-Systems centrally tracks every device and keeps it updated. It can even remotely lock the device and delete all confidential data if needed, including for handset replacements or exchanges. For the church, this roll-out is just the first step in a longer process. One day, it will launch apps that help pas-tors do many of their administrative tasks while on the go.

Johannes.Meisel@t-systems.com www.t-systems.com/industries/churches

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Using and paying for government services online

If you try to use e-government services from home, you will often fail at a key juncture: paying for them. Not so in

Bavaria. All Bavarian agencies and ministries have had access to an e-payment service since January 2017.

Online payment – it’s the goal of Bavaria’s state government. Since taking over as the chief in-formation officer of a state of nearly 13 million, Bavarian Finance Minister Dr. Markus Söder has pushed for digitization. His efforts have

borne fruit, too. For example, Bavaria has introduced an e-payment service for all state agencies. The system, developed by T-Systems along with the Free State of Bavaria, is based on the central ePayService platform. Its standout feature: direct integration with Bavaria’s integrated budget and treasury pro-cess. Now, accounts can be settled automatically without any need for paper-based payment. All downstream activities (account postings) are performed automatically, too, creating a digital end-to-end process in which all data communications are securely encrypted. That allows digital payments to be easily integrated into existing business processes.

The ePayService platform interfaces directly with Bavaria’s integrated budget and treasury process.

ePayService is a boon for ordinary citizens, too. They can pay for a growing number of Bavaria’s fee-based public ser-vices and products with payment methods ranging from Pay-Pal to credit cards. With ePayService, they can also pay online for services provided by institutions such as the State Survey-ing Agency (digital geodata) or the State Research Center for Agriculture (fishing license test). Bavaria’s criminal justice system even gives citizens the opportunity to buy felt bags, garden furniture and home furnishings handcrafted in Bavar-ian prisons at www.haftsache.de – thereby helping inmates reintegrate into society.

Uwe.Geretshuber@t-systems.com www.t-systems.com/digital-administration

www.t-systems.com/digital-transformation

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Organizations can cut down on aggravation and expense by centralizing their telephony infrastructure, particularly if they cast their nets wider than a single country. One key building block: a central SIP gateway for Europe.

Getting Europe on the line

COPY Yvonne Nestler

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Networks

Corporate SIP International

I t was once the queen of telephony, the ultimate symbol of long-distance communications. Today, the telephone booth does nothing more than collect dust in large,sepulchral warehouses. It lost its crown fi rst to the cell

phone, then to the smartphone. However, technological progress hasn’t just come to people who use phones; it helps those who manage telephony services, too – includ-ing organizations. In most cases, their telephony infrastruc-ture is still highly localized, unlike email servers and business applications, which tend to be hosted centrally at a data center. To put this in more concrete terms, each busi-ness site has one or more ISDN lines plus a private branch exchange (PBX). It’s a costly set-up, partly because the organization has to maintain each PBX individually and manage or extend phone lines separately. In addition, global organizations have to negotiate with a raft of local phone service providers and satisfy different requirements for each country, including emergency call functions and special regulations.

That’s all changing now – thanks to all-IP. Voice no longer requires dedicated hardware. Instead, it runs on servers as an application and communicates over data net-works, just like email. Its name: voice over IP (VoIP). It doesn’t really matter where the server for this application resides. All locations can use a central PBX and a central SIP gateway – the telephone line of the all-IP age – that are connected over a data network (VPN), which the organiza-tion has to have anyway.

OPPORTUNITY FOR BIG SAVINGSThe benefi ts are clear: organizations can lower recurring telephony costs by a wide margin while improving security, quality and availability. How? It’s partly because it is easier to maintain a smaller number of PBXs. And it’s because the IT department can manage all the communications ser-vices and end devices centrally for the entire enterprise.

With this set-up, business sites only need to connect to the VPN, and not to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Organizations end up requiring far fewer voice channels to the PSTN for two reasons. First, internal calls stay within the corporate network instead of breaking out to the PSTN through the SIP gateway. Second, since all the sites share the central gateway’s voice channels for exter-nal calls, the IT department no longer has to leave as much of a “buffer” for peak calling periods.

CENTRAL BORDER GUARD Security is better, too. To protect voice communications and data networks, VoIP requires a system to stand guard between the corporate network and the PSTN: a session border controller (SBC). It does a variety of things, from warding off DDoS attacks to supporting the encryption of signaling and voice data to performing important routing functions. If an organization uses one central phone line, it needs only one central session border controller. The SBC not only costs less than buying multiple local components, but also makes it easy to implement highly available VoIP security in a consistent way.

“These benefi ts are multiplied if you centralize phone lines or SIP trunks for several countries, and not just in one country,” said Hanno Wirth, Voice Services & Marketability TC. To make this possible, T-Systems launched Corporate SIP International in August 2017: a central phone line that currently serves 19 European countries, along with a cen-tral network-based enterprise session border controller. Connected sites can make up to 50,000 external phone calls simultaneously. There’s even an option to access a central PBX in a private cloud.

KEY FUNCTIONS REMAINWith Corporate SIP International, organizations need only one partner and one master contract for all their coun-tries instead of juggling umpteen phone service providers per country. T-Systems takes care of rolling out the solu-tion and migrating legacy lines transnationally. All the processes are the same in every country, making it much easier for organizations to manage their telephony across Europe.

At the same time, the solution also satisfi es require-ments that are specifi c to each country. It’s still possible, in other words, to keep existing local phone numbers, locate emergency callers and comply with local laws and regula-tions. If requested, T-Systems will even issue country-spe-cifi c invoices – in a standardized electronic format to allow direct processing.

rudi.riemer@t-systems.com https://www.t-systems.com/solutions/corporate-sip

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Fires, floods, burglaries – unforeseeable events can happen, and insurance companies are experts at calculating the odds. But what if you turned the entire loss management process on its head? What if the insurance company intervened before a loss occurred? – Evolution of a paradigm shift for the risk management industry.

Protect, not replace

Every 30 seconds, a water line bursts. Water causes around 1.1 million loss events a year in Germany, according to the German Insurance Association (GDV).* By the time someone no-tices the leaky pipe, it’s usually too late: water has

long since penetrated the floor and wall. Not so in a smart home. Here, a dripping pipe will be picked up by sensors in the kitchen or laundry room that immediately sound an alarm and initiate an automated notification process. They push out a notification to the homeowner and the insurer’s service portal. The insurer will contact the owner directly and find out what has happened – was it a false alarm, for exam-ple? If the homeowner is unavailable or maybe not even at home, a call will go out to another contact such as a neigh-bor. Once the facts have been established, the insurance company will contact a plumber directly to fix the problem. Right then and there. And not days later, after the home-owner comes back from vacation.

TECHNOLOGY MEETS INSURANCEThe marriage of technology and insurance opens up new frontiers. It tilts the scales away from traditional insurance products that only cover risks, and toward integrated solu-tions with an all-in-one service that kicks in before damage occurs in the first place. It’s an approach that’s setting new standards for policyholders, thanks to ERGO Group and its technology partners, Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems. They have linked smart home sensors to Allysca, the insur-ance company’s service portal. It supports water sensors, smoke detectors as well as door and window alarms. Each incident, whether water, fire or burglary, costs over 1,000 euros on average, according to GDV. However, that often pales in comparison to the intangible losses, particularly those caused by fires. Not even the best insurance com-pany can compensate for them. And that is exactly where the strategic partnership comes in.

ERGO GROUPERGO Group AG is one of Eu-rope’s largest insurance groups with locations in over 30 coun-tries worldwide. Around 44,000 people work for the Munich RE subsidiary, either as salaried employees or as registered sales representatives.

COPY Julia Keller

Every 30 seconds

A water line bursts every 30 seconds in Germany.

Source: GDV

“The future is in digital innovation and services – whether you’re talking about communications, sales or the products themselves,” explained Gregor Wiest, Head of In-novation of the ERGO Group. “A strong technology partner is key. That’s why we’ve been working with Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems from the start.”

This August, the partners announced their digital col-laboration on smart homes and cyber security, unveiling the ERGO Safe Home program at IFA, the trade show for consumer electronics and home appliances. ERGO Safe Home is built around the automatic notification process. It’s available from Deutsche Telekom as an added service for smart home customers, but can also be obtained through ERGO as a rider to a homeowners insurance pol-icy. “Smart homes and cyber security are ushering in a paradigm shift in the insurance industry that is being driven by ERGO, Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems: from adjust-ing and settling claims to curating the entire loss process. This smart home product is just the beginning of a multi-tude of new products and services that were inconceivable before digitization,” stressed Stephan de Haas, Head of Digital Consulting at T-Systems.

WHEN DESIGN THINKING SPARKS INNOVATIONThe kick-off for this visionary innovation program dates back to a management meeting held nearly a year ago.

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* http://www.gdv.de/2017/07/alle-30-sekunden-ein-leitungswasserschaden- in-deutschland/

cal know-how; you require extensive business and industry expertise as well. Luckily, the ERGO team was on board from the start, and so we were able to learn about and un-

derstand the unique needs, drivers and obstacles facing the industry as a whole and the company in particular.” The participants were motivated by the desire “to de-velop innovations that would add real value and allow us to leverage untapped business opportunities. I’m

convinced that’s the reason for the success of our joint innovation program,” said Wiest.

CHANGING OLD THOUGHT PATTERNSDigital insurance services harbor far more untapped po-tential in and outside of smart home and cyber security solutions. At the start of the year, for example, Deutsche Telekom plans to add cyber security to “Computerhilfe Plus” (Computer Help Plus), a product that comprises rep-utation protection, data security and home network secu-rity. “We’re breaking down longstanding boundaries and re-imagining insurance in broader digital contexts, such as connected cars,” said de Haas. That’s the approach that the team is taking at the Digital Co-Innovation Labs in devising new concepts and cross-industry scenarios. One thing, though, is clear: these partners have no plans to abandon digitization.

Stephan.de-Haas@t-systems.com ergo.com/en

www.t-systems.com/enterprise-service-management www.t-systems.com/digital-transformation

This was when ERGO and Deutsche Telekom made a deci-sion to aggressively pursue digitization. Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems then joined up with Detecon, a T-Systems subsidiary, to identify promising digitization issues. Their efforts produced a big-picture view of the project. Next came a design thinking process to refine and clarify the core issues: eight weeks, six issues and two days of work-shops per issue at the Digital Co-Innovation Labs in Berlin. “T-Systems and Deutsche Telekom have nearly ten years of experience in design thinking, and we benefited tremen-dously from their expertise,” stressed Wiest. The approach: a transparent, interdisciplinary, open-ended creative pro-cess that sets realistic expectations, but also demands the audacity to explore new paths, discard well-worn scenarios and replace them with new concepts, no matter how off-beat they may be.

IDEAS FOR BUSINESSTo encourage creativity, Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems brought in experts from a multitude of disciplines to dis-cuss ideas and projects. At one ideation session, the par-ticipants exchanged experiences in artificial intelligence. “We want to develop new digital business models that have maximum relevance for the market and our customers,” ex-plained de Haas. “When you’re engaging in this type of user-centric development, you don’t just need technologi-

DIGITAL CO -INNOVATION LABS800 consultants, 200 innovators and scientists and 10,000 ICT specialists worldwide. Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems have pooled their innovation resourc-es in the Digital Co-Innovation Labs since 2016. Besides technology experts, the labs employ agile processes and innovative tools and methods like design thinking and rapid prototyping.

Over 1,000 eurosInsurance incidents cost over

1,000 euros on average, whether they are due to fire, water or burglary.

Source: GDV

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INTERVIEW Julia Keller

I N T E RV I E W

Mr. Klein, how exactly do insurance and innovative digital technology fit together?Digitization is blurring the boundaries between technologies and industries. As day-to-day activities become increasingly digital, customers have come to expect more. They’re used to communicating over digital media and now use more digitally connected solutions – connected cars and smart homes are just two examples. This has fueled demand for integrated, single-source insurance solutions. It’s now up to the industry to respond by focusing more on customers, pressing ahead with transfor-mation and developing innovative services and business models.

So what does that look like for ERGO?Right now, we’re asking ourselves one big question: how can we best use digital solutions to add significant value for our customers along the entire value chain? One approach is to deploy digital sales tools for information and communication, be it through the website, Skype, chat or WhatsApp. Omni-channel is the name of the game. After all, customers don’t differentiate between online or offline; they expect the same level of service and assistance everywhere. That’s why we support customers across all channels. We’re also looking into ways to embed insurance in a larger solution and integrate our products with new digital technologies.

Can you provide some specifics?We’re augmenting basic insurance with new services and technologies. The very nature of our products is changing as a result. In the past, we would step in as soon as a policyholder sustained a loss. Today, customers want to prevent losses altogether. And now we can, thanks to digital connectivity. New technologies give us influence over the course of events that

Mark Klein, Chief Digital Officer of the ERGO Group and Chairman of the Board of Management of ERGO Digital Ventures AG, about new customer needs, digital services and the changing face of his industry.

“The very nature of our products is changing.”

could lead to an insured loss. We can, say, connect alarm sensors in a smart home to our insurance portal. That gives us the ability not only to insure risks, but to prevent them in the first place and give our customers even more peace of mind. At the same time, living in a digital world presents special threats of its own that need to be covered. We’ve recognized these issues and are expanding our insurance portfolio accordingly.

Where does your new Nexible digital brand fit into the picture?It supplements it. Our transformation strategy is broad-based. On the one hand, we’re investing in our established business by digitizing core processes and products and expanding stan-dard sales, information and communication channels. But we’re also entering entirely new segments. This is where Nexi-ble comes in. It’s the German insurance industry’s first pure-play digital brand. It addresses the demand among younger generations for purely digital insurance products where smart-phones, PCs or tablets are used to sign all the contracts and handle all the communications.

What role do Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems play in the partnership?Integrated, cross-industry solutions are the future. By working with Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems, we can marry our insurance expertise to innovative digital solutions in order to broaden our customer base and win new customer groups that used to be out of reach. If we really want to set new standards, though, we need transformation expertise, not just technology and infrastructure. Deutsche Telekom and T-Systems are strong, equal partners who have the deep innovation capabili-ties to accompany us into the digital age.

www.t-systems.com/digital-transformation

Mark Klein has been the Chief Digital Officer of ERGO Digital Ventures AG since September 2016. The former Deutsche Telekom manager is responsible for digitally transforming ERGO’s traditional business and establishing new business models.

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Good to know

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German industry plans to invest

EUR 40 billion in connected Industry 4.0

projects by 2020.8

5G will transfer data

40,000 timesfaster than 2G.1

5G will likely kick off in 2020. By 2021, there should be

111 million 5G subscribers

for mobile and landline broadband services worldwide. At that point, 5G is expected to account

for 0.7 percent of all mobile communications.3

C L O S E S T C O N N E C T I O N

Nine facts about the connected world of today and tomorrow.

62 % of IT managers

worldwide describe collaboration technologies as important to their business.

In 2011, only 39 percent did.2

Nearly

USD 6 trillion will be spent on IoT solutions

over the next 5 years.5

Germany’s mobile device users surf the Internet at a rate of

24.1 Mbps, the third fastest rate in the world

after the United Kingdom and Cyprus.4

By 2025,

45 % of all cars worldwide will have

embedded connectivity.7

2008 was the fi rst year in which

“things” outnumbered people online.9

87 % of IT managers

view the hybrid cloud as critical for transforming their digital business processes.

50 percent have already shunted workloads into the hybrid cloud in fulfi lment of their digital

business objectives.6

Sources: 1. Bluewin/Swisscom – https://www.bluewin.ch/de/digital/redaktion/2017/17-07/von-1g-bis-5g-die-generationen-der-mobilfunkstandards.html 2. No Jitter/Eastern Management Group; http://www.nojitter.com/post/240172608/sip-market-growth-strong-to-2020, 052017 3. Ovum 4. Akamai: State of the Internet Reports Q1 2017 https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/q1-2017-state-of-the-internet-connectivity-report.pdf (p. 44) 5. Podsystem M2M, http://remotemagazine.com/images/PodSystem.pdf

6. IDG, Hybrid Cloud – Die Triebfeder für den digitalen Wandel, 2016 7. Analysys Mason, CONNECTED CARS: WORLDWIDE TRENDS AND FORECASTS 2013–2025, 112016 8. PricewaterhouseCoopers bei UmweltDialog, http://www.umweltdialog.de/de/wirtschaft/branchen/2017/ngena-wird-Weltnetz-fuer-Industrie-4.0.php , 032017 9. Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/10/27/17-mind-blowing-internet-of-things-facts-everyone-should-read/#1501ec1d1a7a

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