DT expands Open Telekom Cloud into Switzerland

T-Systems, a subsidiary of German MNO Deutsche Telekom, has expanded its Open Telekom Cloud platform into Switzerland, opening new data centres in the region.

T-System’s public cloud platform started off in Germany in 2014 and last year expanded into the Netherlands, so the move into Switzerland with local data centres means Open Telekom Cloud is now available in three regions across Europe.

It is being pitched as a ‘community cloud developed specifically for Switzerland’, and explicitly towards ‘strictly regulated’ industries such as finance, insurance, healthcare and the public sector. T-systems says the expansion is part of its strategy to become the number one IT service provider in the DACH region.

“By expanding our offering to Switzerland, we are consistently continuing the growth of the Open Telekom Cloud,” says Adel al Saleh, member of the Telekom Board of Management and CEO of T-Systems. “All data will be processed and stored exclusively in Swiss data centres, preserving the national data sovereignty of Switzerland and its economy.”

T-System’s claims its data centres are among the most modern and secure facilities in the world and makes a special effort to point out much focus it gives to the compliance with data security in accordance with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It also mentions more than once that the data centres serving the region are in the region – which altogether feels like its making the pitch that Open Telekom Cloud is the European specialist, or a local store for cloud services, offered up as an alternative to the US hyperscalers where it might not be immediately obvious where within their vast global networks of datacentres your particular cloud soul lives.

Whether many people care about this sort of thing is something else – but its an angle at least, which is probably the bare minimum you need when your competition is the hulking leviathans of AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. All three have been raking in ludicrous amounts of cash in recent years, and by this point represent most of the cloud business globally.

It’s not a simple competitively adversarial landscape of course, T-Systems collaborates with some of the hyperscalers in certain areas. But ultimately Open Telekom Cloud its own platform, and there is clearly bags more cash to be made from selling cloud services. If T-Systems fancies it can pry some of it away from the big three, for the sake of competition and providing some counterweight to the domination of those three firms in such an important sector, good for them. Whether it has the warchest and marketing clout to become a genuine contender, even just in Europe, remains to be seen.