The company is consolidating all its internal IT activities, innovation and technology into a separate board area, to be run by Claudia Nemat, with national subsidiaries to focus “mainly on sales, service and marketing”, rather than network strategy.
Nemat, who was board member for Europe and technology, is to head this new operation as board member for technology and innovation.
The company is about to announce a new head of European operations outside Germany. Deutsche Telekom said: “He will bring internationality and a market focus to the table; he knows the industry and the company. At the request of his previous employer, we will not announce his name until next week.”
A third executive, Thorsten Langheim, executive vice president responsible for group corporate development, will be put in charge of Deutsche Telekom’s investments in T-Mobile US and in the UK’s BT, in which it is the largest shareholder with a 12% stake.
Nemat has supervised Deutsche Telekom’s all-IP network rollout in its European operations outside Germany, under the Pan-Net brand, and made clear in an interview earlier this year that the transformation would include German operations by the end of 2018.
Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges welcomed the move. “We believe in the convergence of networks and the value of virtualisation and security. Our customers want to be able to access their data quickly, anywhere and at any time. That’s why we need convergent networks that speak a single language: IP,” he said.
“I’m very pleased that Claudia Nemat will continue to drive the convergence of technology, IT and innovation at our company, a move that will make us faster and more efficient. She has already played a major role in shaping the development of the new department and is taking on a crucial task.”
Deutsche Telekom said that Nemat’s responsibilities would drive product innovations “and be able to serve the requirements of the market more quickly”.
Distribution of products will be the responsibility of each national operator, “which will improve scalability overall, along the lines of Pan-Net”.
The company added: “The network architecture of Pan-Net will make it possible to use a shared, standardised infrastructure throughout Europe. As a result, products and innovations can be distributed on a single platform, across national borders.”
