Helping customers achieve greater success
With operations in more than 20 countries and multi-billion Euro revenues, T-Systems is one of the world’s leading providers of Information and Communications Technology (ICT). It offers integrated solutions for businesses, including the secure operation of legacy systems and classic ICT services.
In Germany, T-Systems’ Production Midmarket serves about 200 mid-size companies with lines of business across healthcare, manufacturing, media and others.
Increasingly customers are also looking to transform through cloud-based services and innovative business models of the future, such as data analytics, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and Industrial Internet.
For the company’s Production Midmarket organisation these trends are fuelling demand for tailored infrastructure, platforms and software.
“Our customers want high quality services, uncompromised security and flexibility, all at a reasonable price,” said Andreas Schwall, Delivery Executive Production Midmarket at T-Systems.
“Our challenge was to reduce IT effort and maintenance-based outages, while improving capacity at the network and security layer.”
Delivering software-defined benefits
T-Systems put its trust in Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™). “Cisco ACI gives us the opportunity to run more agile, flexible operations and opens up new security offerings for our mid-market customers,” said André Tronicke, Manager of Data Centre Services at T-Systems.
“Based on open APIs and an application-centric view of our landscape, we can reduce lead times during the onboarding process and rapidly add more services to our portfolio,” added Andreas Schwall.
Built on Cisco Nexus® 9000 Series Switches, the solution features Application Policy Infrastructure Controllers arranged in a spine and leaf setup. With this software-defined network, T-Systems can rapidly scale up its data centre infrastructure on demand, using automated deployment and secure rollback methods.
T-Systems also benefits from an application-centric view across the IT landscape, especially important when running multi-tenanted data centres. With Cisco ACI, for example, it’s easy to create new policies to satisfy requirements for compliance and data separation.
Building Networks around the Needs of Applications IT is simpler to manage and faster to provision. Unlike before, when they took days or weeks, deployments are completed in hours. Yet the transformation goes beyond time-to-market.
Now application traffic steers the network, rather than the other way around, enabling T-Systems to build the network environment around different customer applications, significantly improving performance and fulfilment of requirements.
Optimising software-defined automation has reduced manual tasks by 90%, providing a productivity gain equivalent to three full-time employees.
Designed using open interfaces, ACI also enables T-systems to create new security solutions and connect different cloud offerings in order to seamlessly serve its customers.
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