• Germany NatCo and Beyond Now expand partnership with collaboration on B2B2X digital marketplace.
  • Offering targeting enterprises and their clients with voice, connectivity, 5G, data analytics, and IoT services.
  • Partners have been working on digital business marketplace technology since at least 2019.

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Telekom Deutschland taps Beyond Now for Magenta B2B2X

Source: Unsplash / Lisheng Chang

Telekom Deutschland and existing partner Beyond Now have teamed up to create a business-to-business-to-x (B2B2X) digital marketplace that is designed to enable enterprise customers, as well as clients of those customers, to buy digital services from Deutsche Telekom and partners.

Magenta B2B2X, which is based on Beyond Now’s Infonova Digital Business Platform, aims to enable partners and customers to “procure and exchange services such as voice, connectivity, 5G, data analytics, IoT, AI, and more”.

Jörg Pommerening, Senior Sales TC Services and Squad Lead, MBC Magenta B2B2x, at Deutsche Telekom Business Solutions (Telekom Deutschland’s enterprise services division), described Magenta B2B2X as a “customisable, multi-tenant, cloud-based marketplace where any ICT products can be procured digitally via the platform”.

According to Pommerening, DT Business Solutions selected Infonova because of the “alignment of our vision and platform’s capabilities. We look forward to being able to drive forward our B2B2X digital transformation goals, delivering on our promise to support our enterprise customers’ ICT needs”.

Telekom Deutschland has said Magenta B2B2X was launched in 2023, although Pommerening’s LinkedIn entry indicates he has held his position as Squad Lead since January 2022. Deutsche Telekom and BearingPoint, the former parent company of Beyond Now, presented Magenta B2B2X at the 2023 edition of the Ministerialkongress (Ministerial Congress) organised by BearingPoint (with DT support) in Berlin during September.

Beyond Now became independent from BearingPoint via a management buyout in 2021.

Telekom Deutschland said it will also benefit from the following platform capabilities:

  • Improved time to market with automated ordering, fulfilment, and orchestration for B2B services.
  • Managing the technical integration of purchase to provisioning, administration, and services.
  • Giving customers easy access to the products that best match their specific needs thanks to automated product selection/suggestion.
  • Digitising the complete Telekom Deutschland product portfolio.
  • Simplifying integration with existing customer systems through standardised application programming interfaces.
  • Supporting the hierarchies of complex customer organisational structures.

Catalyst for digital growth

Deutsche Telekom has collaborated with BearingPoint on B2B2X since at least 2019, when the pair took part in the Digital Business Marketplace Catalyst at TM Forum’s DTW19 event. Other participants included Agile Fractal Grid, BT, Digiglu, Intel, NTT Group, and DT’s American NatCo T-Mobile US. The aim of the project was to explore how companies in traditional industries can be digitally transformed and make use of digital techniques to abstract physical products and services, secure the device, and create frictionless business-to-business-to-x partner trading ecosystems. The project also won an Outstanding Catalyst for Innovation award.

Dublin-based Beyond Now was launched in 2018 as a standalone business under BearingPoint’s ownership. It built its services on the technology base of Infonova, a business support system provider that was founded in 1989 and acquired by BearingPoint in 2005. Today, Beyond Now describes itself as an “ecosystem orchestration and digital platform provider, powering organisations to launch new services at speed and grow revenue by utilising our digital platform, digital marketplace, and SaaS BSS”.

DT Business Solutions, which falls under the remit of Telekom Deutschland, was created as an over-arching enterprise communications operation in 2020, as part of a wide-ranging reshuffle of Group B2B interests (Deutsche Telekomwatch, #94–#95 and passim). The unit has subsequently flagged various enterprise services partnerships including with Ivanti on mobile management; Intel, Teridion, Zscaler, and others on premium business connectivity (Deutsche Telekomwatch, #122); Cisco Systems, Microsoft, RingCentral, and Zoom on unified communications (Deutsche Telekomwatch, #112); and more besides. Notably, DT also recently selected Juniper for its Magenta Business Networks SD-X self-service platform (Deutsche Telekomwatch, #121).