Events

AppDirect in Munich: Helping European Telcos Succeed in the Cloud

By Richard Dufty / April 27, 2014

This week, members of the AppDirect team are in Munich, Germany, for the Telco Cloud World Forum (TCWF), the globe’s largest event focused on the telecom industry and the cloud. For AppDirect, Germany feels almost like a second home; one of our largest partners, Deutsche Telekom, is based here, and it’s a busy hub for innovation in cloud services delivery. (It’s also been exciting to spend a few days here securing AppDirect’s new Munich offices, but more on that later.)

The same can be said of Europe as a whole. Here at TCWF, there are dozens of telecom service providers, including 70 speakers and 350+ attendees from countries all over Europe, and all of them have a critical goal: to learn how they can use the incredible power of the cloud to better serve their customers. Seeing all of these companies in one place, it’s clear that the cloud economy truly has no borders.

European telcos understand cloud computing and why it’s so revolutionary; here, it’s not a question of if telecom companies should offer cloud-based services, but how… and how quickly they can be successful doing so. That’s one reason we were so excited to present a pre-conference workshop at TCWF that included an in-depth exploration of cloud services best practices to launch, manage, and rapidly grow a marketplace across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

AppDirect powers the marketplaces of some of the largest telecom companies in Europe—including DT, TeliaSonera, Swisscom—and many more to announce in the coming weeks. Given this experience, and experience with providers around the world, we’ve been able to put together detailed best practices that are extremely effective in making marketplaces succeed.

However, the 80+ workshop attendees didn’t have to take our word for it alone. We were fortunate to have a panel of executives from both telcos and software vendors who had a lively discussion about which best practices are most important and why. For example, Simon Lunn, VP Customer Service and Operations, Cloud Services at Deutsche Telekom, pointed out that, “You have to choose the right and most applicable best practices for your organization that can drive the most impact and then take a longer term approach to success.”

On the software vendor side, Jesper Frederiksen, Vice President and General Manager for EMEA at DocuSign, added, “What makes our partnership with AppDirect so effective has been integrating once to their platform, which enables us to partner with service providers across Europe. As a SaaS provider, we are excited to work with telcos who have millions of established customers. In return, we can provide best practices around customer acquisition and campaigns. A platform like AppDirect sits in the middle and facilitates this type of relationship, which is very valuable.”

Overall, the workshop was a tremendous success, and we’re pleased that we were able to share so much vital information with a wide cross-section of TCWF attendees. We’re looking forward to some traditional Bavarian hospitality at the official AppDirect TCWF networking event at Der Pschorr.

Next up for AppDirect, a panel about partnering with telcos and a keynote that covers trends in cloud services and highlights several case studies featuring our current partners.

Follow AppDirect’s Twitter feed to see even more exciting updates from TCWF, and check back here soon for more details about AppDirect’s expansion into Europe, including more about our Munich offices.

Richard Dufty is VP of Global Sales and Strategic Partnerships at AppDirect.