Deutsche Telekom Delivers Best Ranked Telco Provider App Across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland with Dynatrace

Deutsche Telekom is overhauling its operations to reflect changing consumer demands. The rise of the “gigabit society”, with ubiquitous high-speed internet both at home and on the move, means consumers now expect constant connectivity along with a hyper-responsive customer experience. To meet the needs of these modern consumers, Deutsche Telekom is transforming itself – rather than a telecoms firm, it now sees itself as a software company that provides telecoms services. As part of this transformation, Deutsche Telekom has embraced software-defined networks, doubled down on support for internet of things devices, and rolled out application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect with partner services more readily. Alongside these transformations, Deutsche Telekom has rolled out a single mobile app to enable a seamless customer experience across all its markets.

To build its mobile app, Deutsche Telekom embraced a cloud-native technology environment, turning to microservices and APIs hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This new, more flexible architecture enabled the Deutsche Telekom mobile app to function across all countries and markets, underpinned by the same back-end functionality. It also made it easier for the app to interface with offerings from partners and other service providers. Deutsche Telekom’s migration to a cloud-native environment created undeniable benefits as well as new complexities that required a sophisticated monitoring solution.

Deutsche Telekom realized its environment’s newfound technical complexity required a different approach to monitoring and observability. What Deutsche Telekom needed was a platform that could provide a single view of all its observability and security data, with AI to deliver rapid and precise answers as to the root causes of software problems.

“More than 70% of our applications are in various clouds, and there’s no human that can have a complete view across all of them,” said Laurent Donnay, SVP IT Sales and Platforms at Deutsche Telekom. “To assess our IT landscape, we would have to review six to seven individual applications, across three to four different cloud infrastructures. Dynatrace’s platform allowed us to bring all this information together in a single source of truth so our teams can resolve problems early and quickly.”

• More time for innovation – After adopting Dynatrace, Deutsche Telekom slashed the time taken to perform root cause analysis (RCA) of problems with its app. Deutsche Telekom achieved a dramatic 61% reduction in its average RCA timeline, dropping from 3.3 hours to just one hour. This reduced manual effort freed up DevOps teams to focus on innovation, investing their time in finding new ways to make the app even better for customers.
• Improved subscriber experiences – Dynatrace’s ability to identify the precise root cause of issues in real time allowed Deutsche Telekom to overcome performance problems faster than ever before. Deutsche Telekom reduced its mean time to resolve (MTTR) issues by 75%, from four hours to just one. Customers now face less downtime when issues do arise, significantly improving their experience.
• Driving connectivity between teams – By providing a single view of observability and security data, Dynatrace allowed multiple teams across Deutsche Telekom to collaborate to diagnose and resolve incidents faster and more effectively. Through Dynatrace, Deutsche Telekom has broken down silos across its 30,000-strong IT, DevOps, and engineering teams, supporting a more collaborative way of working.
• Enabling gigabit speed response – The continuous, real-time visibility and precise answers from Dynatrace enable Deutsche Telekom to preemptively identify and resolve issues well before they progress into service interruptions. As a result, Deutsche Telekom has further improved the customer experience by avoiding many incidents entirely.

“We’re proud of how successful our mobile app has been as a result of our work with Dynatrace,” said Donnay. “In fact, the Deutsche Telekom app has been ranked as the best telco provider app across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. I don't think we would have reached that level of recognition and reward from our customers without Dynatrace.”