By Antony Akilade
Next week Deutsche Telekom plans to announce that it is to venture into the IT services market by allowing ts internal IT services arm to chase external customers. Prior to the announcement the company has broken out financial details of the division showing that the Darmstadt, Germany, based unit known as Computer Service Management GmbH (DeTeCSM) returned DM1.59bn ($855m) in revenue for the last twelve months and earnings of DM156m ($83.7m) after tax.
De Te CSM is currently a wholly-owned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG. The division offers a broad spectrum of IT services. Including the operation of computing centers as well as client/server and workplace systems, user service and call center, web services and services associated with office communications. These services are marketed through Deutsch Telekom outlets and enables it to boast a strong locally based service.
At present 90% of the company’s business is associated with parent company Deutsche Telekom, but the launch on the September 29 will signal the company’s repositioning as a fully fledged IT services business targeting construction, utility, public administration and local government industry sectors. Over the past year DeTeCSM has been building a number of external customers. Major projects completed to date include the installation and configuration of 60,000 PCs for the Bunndesanstalt and maintenance services for 4,000 desktops for Deutsche Lufthansa.
DeTeCSM employs approximately 5,200 following the 1st September 1999 integration of the Deutsche telecom IT service arm of t-mobile when more than 280 employees transferred to DeTeCSM. The division currently manages 3,200 servers, with around 200,000 clients and services around 450 applications such as large corporate databases.
