Deutsche Telekom's (XETRA: DTE.DE) IT unit T-Systems is bullish about the cloud services opportunity, but does not want its customers' information being compromised by the U.S. government accessing their information.
With security being top of mind for businesses considering cloud services, Reinhard Clemens, T-Systems' CEO, said in a recent conference in Bonn, Germany that it wants to be able to shield their German customers from U.S. government access that's allowed through the Patriot Act.
"The Americans say that no matter what happens I'll release the data to the government if I'm forced to do so, from anywhere in the world," Clemens said in a Bloomberg article. "Certain German companies don't want others to access their systems. That's why we're well-positioned if we can say we're a European provider in a European legal sphere and no American can get to them."
If T-Systems was able to get a government seal it would give them another weapon to battle both emerging European (Atos SA and Cap Gemini SA) and U.S.-based cloud competitors including Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and IBM (NYSE: IBM).
T-Systems forecast that a big portion of the €2 billion ($2.74 billion) in revenue between 2009 and 2015 will come from delivering software and data storage via the cloud.
While Clemens would not give specific sales figures, he did say that that T-Systems' cloud products are increasing by 49 percent a year.
Leveraging guidelines provided by the Federal Office for Information Security, which is working with the EU to develop common security standards for cloud, T-Systems could get the German security certificate it wants for its customers.
For more:
- Bloomberg has this article
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