KONE Corporation moves to the cloud with T-Systems

KONE Corporation, listed on the Helsinki stock exchange, and T-Systems, the corporate customer arm of Deutsche Telecom, today announced a partnership in which KONE will be outsourcing all of its Data Center operations, SAP landscape and service for its workstation systems around the world to T-Systems.

KONE is one of the world's largest elevator and escalator companies with operations in more than 50 countries, 40,000 employees and more than 1000 local offices around the world. KONE manages all of its global business operations through a central SAP system. In the future, KONE will be sourcing this software as a cloud application from the T-Systems Data Center in Munich, Germany. In addition, the Telekom subsidiary will also assume responsibility for running other corporate applications and databases.

Since the employees of the elevator and escalator specialist provide customer services at various locations around the world, KONE will also be sourcing its communication and collaboration software – Exchange, Lync and SharePoint – as cloud services from T-Systems. The central platform, which is located in the T-Systems Data Center in Munich, will enable KONE employees to collaborate with their colleagues around the world at all times, from any of the company's sites. More ever, T-Systems is providing service support for all workstation systems at the customer's international locations. T-Systems will rely on its service desks in China and Spain to deliver these services, thus giving KONE employees access to desktop experts around the clock.

"Since our workforce spans the globe, and because we want to give our customers and employees the best high-quality service possible, we need an IT partner who is at our side around the world, supporting us anytime and anyplace," says Kati Hagros, CIO of KONE Corporation. “We selected T-Systems after a careful evaluation process. T-Systems is a cloud-computing pioneer that can offer KONE the scalable platforms and global delivery capability we need. We were also convinced by T-Systems high-quality portfolio of standardized component services and we expect to improve the maturity of our service management processes significantly.”

Gartner considers the agreement between KONE and T-Systems one of the largest outsourcing services agreements in Scandinavia this year. And for T-Systems to win this contract shows, that there is now a third alternative to the traditional IT vendors and the new offshore challengers in the Scandinavian market for strategic outsourcing.

"The contract agreement with KONE is a further example of our expertise and success in cloud computing at the international level. It also highlights the attractiveness of our wide-ranging cloud portfolio," says Reinhard Clemens, Member of the Board of Management at Deutsche Telekom and CEO of T-Systems. "Our corporate customers appreciate our global, secure, high-availability cloud services, as well as our proven responsibility for delivering solutions and managing ICT processes."