At the same time, its Google-powered sovereign cloud for Germany “will be available to German cloud customers ahead of schedule”, said Deutsche Telekom.
T-Systems, owned by Deutsche Telekom, and Google Cloud said last September they were planning to build a sovereign German cloud to provide services to the country’s enterprises and its public sector.
The companies said then they will jointly develop a “large spectrum” of next-generation sovereign cloud solutions and infrastructure, including wide-scale data centre capacity.
They said the joint offering would be available from “mid-2022”, but today’s statement from Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges and Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai (pictured) moved the date to the no-less-precise “spring 2022”.
Deutsche Telekom said “it will be available for all clients, initially out of the Frankfurt Google Cloud Region”, and said “they will jointly drive innovation for the cloud, closely aligned with the new German government’s digital plans which aims to build a public administration cloud based on a multi-cloud strategy and open interfaces, as well as meeting strict sovereignty and transparency requirements”.
There will be a co-innovation centre in Munich, as announced in November 2021, and executive briefing facilities in Munich and Berlin.
But Höttges and Pichai also said that they were collaborating on the rich communication service (RCS) standard, something that has been promoted by the GSMA and others in the industry for years without much success.
In June 2020 Mavenir announced that it was interconnecting the RCS operations in Europe of Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica and Vodafone.
Today’s announcement does not mention Mavenir. Instead it says that all Telekom users of Messages by Google will be upgraded to RCS, working on all Android smartphones.
It noted that Messages by Google is “powered by Google’s Jibe Cloud”.
Apple has so far resisted the temptation to add RCS support to its own iMessages service, meaning that Android users cannot exchange RCS messages with users of Apple iPhones.
Android has a 60% market share in Germany, with Apple’s iOS holding the other 40%.
Höttges and Pichai were addressing around 1,000 managers from Deutsche Telekom on what they called “this expanded partnership”.
Höttges highlighted what he said were better security features of the Android RCS approach. “Protecting personal information is of the utmost importance to us. With our new service, we are making fast messaging from people to people, and especially between companies and their clients, secure and convenient.”
