Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom today announced a seven-year agreement that expands their longstanding partnership to help enterprises and schools shift more IT resources to the cloud.

The Germany operator and cloud giant intend to combine their respective services in a framework that aims to deliver more resilient and flexible cloud-based tools for remote productivity and education. 

“We will collaborate more intensively to deliver high performance cloud services between Microsoft and Deutsche Telekom,” Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges said in a video about the agreement. He added that businesses need connectivity, collaborative software, and increased digitization of services for an increasingly physically isolated workforce.

“This is what our partnership is about. How can we shape now the way going forward that we really become a digital society, which is using the tools which Microsoft and DT provide,” Höttges said.

The operator said it plans to migrate the majority of its internal IT workloads to the public cloud by 2025, and pointed to Azure as a “central part of that strategy.” The agreement also calls for Deutsche Telekom to offer its customers direct access to Microsoft Azure and Office 365.

“The kind of constraints the pandemic has created for our society and our economy is not something that any of us would have anticipated,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. 

“We, on an instant basis, had to really come up with a solution for remote everything, whether it was remote work, remote education, remote health care, remote manufacturing. It’s not just about any one part, it’s about the end-to-end, you have to have the connectivity, you need to have that network, you need to have the software tools, all of them need to come together,” he added. 

Azure is also the preferred cloud platform for specific services provided by T-Systems, the arm of Deutsche Telekom that focuses on enterprise customer needs. The companies said they will combine capabilities to help businesses of all types and sizes move SAP environments to Azure and adopt cloud services for software and IT workloads.

“This validates some of Microsoft’s recent acquisitions to bring telco depth to Azure,” said Will Townsend, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, referring to Microsoft’s acquisition of Affirmed Networks and Metaswitch Networks. 

That core network and cloud-native network software pairs with Microsoft’s 5G strategy for private Azure Edge Zones and Azure IoT Central, Shawn Hakl, a partner at Microsoft, recently told SDxCentral.

“This should bring needed scale for DT to support companies that will support remote work post pandemic as well as support the mentioned distance learning initiative launched,” Townsend said.

The companies are working on a new project that equips German schools with connectivity and remote learning tools based on cloud-based IT infrastructure and Microsoft 365. The education system in Germany, like most countries, was not prepared to shift quickly to distance learning and Deutsche Telekom is now providing connectivity to 17,000 schools, but they need more and that’s where Microsoft’s productivity tools come into play, Höttges explained.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom’s timeline for moving most of its internal IT workloads to the cloud by 2025 is long “but realistic given many operators are in the early stages of their cloud journeys,” Townsend said. 

Interestingly, neither company mentioned 5G, edge computing, or virtualized network functions as part of this agreement, which suggests that the agreement is, while broad, more narrowly focused on delivering a combined framework for connectivity and cloud-based tools for businesses and schools. 

“From my perspective, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leading edge enablement among the major cloud providers. I expect that over time Azure will catch up,” Townsend said. “I assume DT will find other avenues in the short term to address mobile edge computing to supercharge its 5G efforts, especially in private cellular networking deployments.”