This article is also available in Italian / Questo articolo è disponibile in Italiano.
At Wind Tre, we serve around 30 million customers across Italy with telecommunications solutions that span mobile, fixed and Internet services. And now we're about to broaden what we can do even further, following a major agreement with Telefónica.
We’re part of CK Hutchison Holdings' Three Group Europe, and under the agreement announced previously, CK Hutchison and Telefónica are joining forces to complement each other’s product offerings, and to reach more geographies for customers.
We’re really excited about what this means for Wind Tre customers in Italy: it opens a significant new set of digital products and services, and it gives Italian enterprises direct access to territories abroad. Plus, multinationals who want to tender for services across geographies in Latin America and the largest European countries can now include Italy in those framework agreements for the first time.
Three Group Europe joins another 10 operators already in Telefónica's Partners Program, with operations in 65 countries and a total of 1.8 billion customers.
This is a fully strategic partnership, and it will mean that Three Group Europe joins another 10 operators already in Telefónica's Partners Program, with operations in 65 countries and a total of 1.8 billion customers.
Probably the biggest relevance of this agreement is the way it will let Wind Tre support the digital transformation programs of multinational companies. That includes the retail market, where enterprises may want to change the customer experience by using digital enablers and look across the whole journey of the customer. Whether someone is visiting a shop or using e-commerce, those enablers can be delivered by a proven solution stack that we can now provide to our customers, from Telefónica.
Another solution area is industrial IoT: Telefónica has a number of references where utility companies are enabling transformation by connecting remote sensors and pulling in and analysing data.
This is all about business intelligence, empowering companies to access data that drives better insights and helps them get to market faster.
The relevance of the partnership will also grow as our own reach in Italy grows. We’re already a leading provider of fibre to the home access in Italy, with an ongoing fibre rollout that aims to reach all major Italian municipalities by early 2022. Both our national infrastructure and our business-to-business relationships provide deep access into the Italian market for Telefónica, and vice versa, with Italian companies now gaining direct access to markets where Telefónica operates rather than going via brokers for services.
The Wind Tre sales team will engage directly with Telefónica to jointly pursue opportunities and work together to serve the needs of our Italian enterprise customers.
We’re also pleased that this partnership is a true collaborative engagement. The Wind Tre sales team will engage directly with Telefónica to jointly pursue opportunities and work together to serve the needs of our Italian enterprise customers.
The collaboration really comes at an opportune time for large businesses who need to transform. The pressure to innovate is growing, for many reasons: rising customer expectations, the need to decrease time-to-market, the speed of technology change and increasing competition for staff.
Companies also need to improve productivity, and that isn’t just a technology issue. Many enterprises are discovering that digital transformation is not just about changing systems, but about changing culture and the mindset of employees.
Both we and Telefónica are committed to expanding our business-to-business operations and product sets, and to engaging with enterprises at a more consultative level, including delivering and managing mission-critical services and applications on behalf of our business customers.
A telecommunications partner is a strategic partner for global enterprises now, because the next-generation digital services that underpin transformation rely totally on connectivity. We already work very closely with Italian enterprises and global multinationals located in Italy, and this agreement allows us to move those relationships new a level of value.
You can find more information about the partnership between Telefónica and CK Hutchison, which will be delivered via the CKH Innovation Opportunities Development unit, here.