From vertical to horizontal and back to the vertical: our way to a new horizon

As of July 1st, the Internet of Things at Deutsche Telekom has a new corporate home. With our newly founded DT IoT GmbH, we are driving the IoT business of Deutsche Telekom into new heights by bringing all relevant stakeholders together and taking end-to-end responsibility. Our goal: to become the leading orchestrator of the IoT market.

“It’s a waste of time to offer your customers a complete vertical solution.”

This goal is illustrated perfectly by our first major project as an independent company: instead of a complete vertical solution, we developed the DT IoT hub, bringing together all relevant capabilities and allowing us to take end-to-end responsibility by orchestrating truly integrated solutions.

To make it clear: In my eyes it would be a wasted effort to offer your customers a complete vertical solution by your own means. Why? To make such a solution work, you need a chipset that has to be integrated into a module, which in turn has to be built into a device that then communicates with the sensor and needs some kind of connectivity. The data is then stored again in something like a data warehouse; you need analytics, security and IoT software applications. To cut this nearly endless story short: I don’t know any player in the world that would be able to fulfill all these requests on a competitive basis within its own capabilities. Having said that there are of course the types of customers that require packaged E2E solutions for a variety of reasons. To meet the vast needs of the IoT customer base we decided to build horizontally and drive the ecosystem to engage vertically to enable E2E use-cases.

“We must strive for horizontal solutions – driven by strategy and interoperability, not by single underlying technologies.”

We are now in the age of digitization, and thus of networks, connections and automized insights. Instead of vertical, we must strive for horizontal solutions – driven by strategy, not by single technologies. IoT is such a huge field for technological innovation and it already provides us with many, maybe too many, possibilities. In our view IoT works best as an ecosystem where we come together to create value. So, instead of developing complete E2E vertical solutions, we would rather provide and orchestrate a horizontal platform on which we can grow and orchestrate the ecosystem together allowing for the best of breed E2E vertical solutions.

IoT is a complex industry with a lot of different technologies – but without little harmonization between these technologies and possible business models. With our new DT IoT hub we offer to reduce this complexity and help customers who know what they want to achieve, but don’t know where or how to start. Our mission is to help our customers reach the full potential of an IoT-driven business by reducing barriers. We make IoT modular, transparent and manageable.

 “Our mission is to help customers reach the full potential of an IoT-driven business.”

So what’s on offer in our IoT hub? We are combining connectivity, devices, cloud services and a wide area of micro services such as data analysis and security. Open and standardized interfaces simplify communication between different systems. Different IoT ecosystems are now able to work hand in hand. The same applies to all important clouds, protocols, and technologies. Last but not least, the data is available wherever and whenever users need it – whether on an integrated dashboard or through APIs.

Although we have been working on this idea for some time, the Corona crisis has shown very clearly why this approach is the right one. Before the crisis, there were many companies without an IoT strategy. This is now changing dramatically. Now almost all of them have digital topics on their agenda. IoT is at the top of the list, and we are here to support and create new opportunities by reducing barriers for our clients. We won’t stop until everything is connected.