Deutsche Telekom: Realizing the IPTV Vision

This ability to develop new and desirable offerings is vital in the notoriously competitive communications market—and thus supports Deutsche Telekom’s drive to achieve high performance.

Deutsche Telekom is one of the largest integrated telecommunications companies in Europe. It offers service to tens of millions of private and corporate customers in nearly 50 countries, providing a wide range of telecommunications and information technology services—from domestic and wireless communications, broadband services to complex IT and telecommunications solutions.

Accenture High Performance Business research reveals that high-performance telecommunication companies need to be able to quickly deploy innovative new technology platforms and shift their market focus to new value-adding services.

As a leader in its industry, Deutsche Telekom early set its sights on “the next big thing”: Internet Protocol television (IPTV), a service that allows consumers to receive TV and other multimedia services over broadband. The commercial bundling of IPTV, telephone services and Internet access delivered via a single broadband connection is referred to as “triple play.”

By offering new value-added entertainment services around IPTV, Deutsche Telekom’s key objective was to offset declining voice revenues and limited growth perspectives in an increasingly competitive marketplace, where fixed-mobile substitution, VoIP and aggressive communications offerings from cable TV operators force telecommunications carriers to protect their core business and seek new sources of revenue and customer growth.

For the IPTV middleware, Deutsche Telekom selected the Microsoft® Mediaroom™ multimedia software platform. For the IPTV service launch, Deutsche Telekom faced a highly challenging situation: to architect, integrate, roll out and get operational a complex IP television service platform for a demanding, real-time, 24/7, high-bandwidth, mass-market service in a very short time.

Accenture provided an innovative and pragmatic approach to solution design and delivery as well as the required systems integration experience and personnel highly skilled on media infrastructure systems and operations. Therefore, Accenture was the logical choice for Deutsche Telekom. The Accenture-led team also included members from Avanade, a joint venture company of Accenture and Microsoft, who brought additional deep technical knowledge of Microsoft technology.

Accenture initially supported Deutsche Telekom in a strategic study regarding next-generation television and potential market entries. Subsequently Accenture helped Deutsche Telekom to define and manage the functional and technical architecture requirements of the new IPTV media infrastructure.

Together with Deutsche Telekom, Accenture also developed and implemented a robust organizational structure for IPTV platform management. This structure—organization and development processes—was finally used as the blueprint for a new department within Deutsche Telekom and is seen as best practice within the Deutsche Telekom technology organization.

Since the successful launch in October 2006, Accenture and Avanade have been providing continuing support to evolve, scale and operate the IPTV service platform.

Dieter Engel, Senior VP Media Product Development, sums up Accenture’s contribution as follows: “Our partnership with Accenture means that we have access to a unique combination of end-to-end capabilities in IPTV. Their experience in broadband, video-on demand, cable and other IPTV roll-outs is a valuable resource for the Deutsche Telekom project and an important contribution which helped to ensure that this launch was a success.”

In less than one year, the Accenture-led team enabled Deutsche Telekom to successfully launch the IPTV service in Germany’s 10 largest cities. By the end of 2008, Deutsche Telekom had extended its infrastructure to more than 750 German cities and some 500,000 customers ordered the triple-play offer.

The new IPTV platform enables Deutsche Telekom to attract new customers, reduce customer churn and generate incremental revenues. Most important, the IPTV offering has helped position Deutsche Telekom for high performance in one of the most competitive telecommunications markets in Europe.

The product is marketed under the T-Home Entertain brand.