Sven Löffler, business development executive of big data and data-driven business at T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, oversaw the launch of the Telekom Data Intelligence Hub. The Telekom Data Intelligence Hub is a secure marketplace for data that allows companies to transfer end-to-end, encrypted data to their partners, without that data being stored centrally or externally.
Löffler explained how it was developed in 2013 and formalised a year later when Deutsche Telekom signed a partnership with four companies, including Intel and Cloudera. “We developed the portfolio element and ramped up the private cloud solution – big, huge clusters for our enterprise customers at Deutsche Telekom. We won a couple of customers, like Deutsche Bahn, that are using our joint offering. We are providing the managed service part of a Hadoop platform and Cloudera is delivering the technology,” he said. He added that, during this time, the data economy became more and more important and Deutsche Telekom realised that, as a telecommunications company, it had to monetise data.
“What we’re doing for 42 million customers is anonymising signal and traffic data.”
In 2015, this resulted in the introduction of a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, Motionlogic. He said: “What we’re doing for 42 million customers is anonymising signal and traffic data from our networks, and monetising it by giving customers access to work with this kind of data.” Löffler was then asked by the management team if he would like to join and ramp-up a business for the data economy which has led him to this point. He said: “That is my role, defining the product and running a team that is implementing and developing the Telekom Data Intelligence Hub.”
Data is ingested into the Data Intelligence Hub using a special connector that is based on Apache Kafka and is capable of scaling to large amounts of streaming data. After a six-month phase of visibility, this was the execution phase. Löffler said: “This is what we are executing – a clear understanding that we would like to share data. We are giving customers access to weather data, to Motionlogic data, to all European open data sources. These are starting points.”
Löffler, who has 20 years’ experience in business intelligence, told DataIQ that he joined Deutsche Telekom at the start of 2013 with the clear idea to ramp-up the business. He knew that there were gaps in his knowledge, but was certain of the growing significance of a particular software. He said: “I’d heard about big data but I had no clue about it. I had data warehouse experience and I learnt that Hadoop was the next big thing.”
Löffler and Mick Hollison, chief marketing officer at Cloudera, spoke to DataIQ at the Cloudera Strata conference.
