The City of Cottbus and T-Systems have concluded a partnership agreement extending over a period of 10 years. The Deutsche Telekom subsidiary is to modernize the city's Information and Telecommunications department, which previously provided all IT services for the city council, as well as upgrade the council's workstation technology and operate its specialized processes. Public-administration employees are reliant on data center services in their day-to-day work, maintaining large volumes of data such as resident information and vehicle registrations.

In signing the partnership agreement, the city aims to reduce ICT costs over the medium term by only paying for the services it actually uses. Until now, the City of Cottbus performed all of its IT and data center services in-house. The need to upgrade existing technology has made this latest move essential.

Cottbus plans to concentrate on the core tasks of a municipality

At the contract signing, Mayor of Cottbus Holger Kelch emphasized that municipalities need to focus on tapping into savings potential. The quality of its IT services has always been excellent, he continued, but there had been virtually no shared IT services for the city council and the in-house operations of the City of Cottbus. "We want to save money whilst enhancing quality further and concentrating on our core tasks as a municipality." Outsourcing IT services to specialists has long been standard practice in the industry, said the mayor.

Cottbus data center open to other towns and cities

In future, the data center will be capable of providing services across municipalities.  T-Systems will structure the technology to ensure that additional municipalities or public operations have the option of obtaining their computing services from a shared data center. "We will run the data center as an operation of the City of Cottbus and widen it into a municipal association if the interest is there," explained Mayor Kelch. The center is to remain in Berliner Strasse near the city hall for the time being, and will be relocated once the expansion of the TIP commercial zone is finished.

The public-service status of Cottbus city council employees in the existing inter-municipality data center in south-eastern Brandenburg will not be affected. They will remain employees of the city council, which continues to be the public-sector customer for IT services. T-Systems is responsible for operating the data center and will only provide those services that City of Cottbus employees cannot perform themselves. Employees interested in a change also have the option of moving to the partner company, T-Systems.

"This IT project is our largest to date for a municipality," said Holger Hille, Head of Sales, Regional and Local Authorities. "At present, virtually all German municipalities operate their own data centers, but we will start to see personnel re-sources being stretched to capacity in future due to a lack of specialists in this field. Yet municipalities, just like any other company, are dependent upon reliable IT systems. This makes a partnership model, such as the one we have developed with Cottbus, a viable alternative for other municipalities to operating their own in-house data centers." What is more, he continued, the new technology opens up the opportunity to underpin the modernization of public administration. A move in this direction would make it much easier to, for example, introduce the central public-authority telephone number 115 across Germany, or implement the EU Services Directive.

About Deutsche Telekom AG
Deutsche Telekom is one of the world's leading integrated telecommunications companies with around 129 million mobile customers, approximately 36 million fixed-network lines and more than 16 million broadband lines (as of December 31, 2010). The Group provides products and services for the fixed network, mobile communications, the Internet and IPTV for consumers, and ICT solutions for business customers and corporate customers. Deutsche Telekom is present in over 50 countries and has around 247,000 employees worldwide. The Group generated revenues of EUR 62.4 billion in the 2010 financial year - more than half of it outside Germany (as of December 31, 2010).

About T-Systems
Drawing on a global infrastructure of data centers and networks, T-Systems operates information and communication technology (ICT) systems for multinational corporations and public sector institutions. T-Systems provides integrated solutions for the networked future of business and society. The company's some 47,600 employees combine industry expertise and ICT innovations to add significant value to customers' core business all over the world. T-Systems generated revenue of around EUR 9.1 billion in the 2010 financial year.