Deutsche Telekom said it has extended its partnership with Evernote to cover its 12 markets in Europe in addition to Germany, in a deal that sees the German incumbent further embrace the opportunities brought through partnerships with OTT service providers.
The German operator first joined forces with Evernote early in 2013 and offered the cloud-based information management application to its German users free of charge for a year. Now, Deutsche Telekom is offering free Evernote Premium services for six months during a promotional period that also provides a 1 GB upload capacity. The operator added that this means that 57 million mobile customers are now eligible for six months of Evernote Premium.
Like many European operators, Deutsche Telekom has recognised that it needs to partner with over-the-top providers such as Evernote in order to be able to offer innovative services to its customers.
"Partnerships like these enable us to provide our customers across Europe with access to an increasing number of innovative online services," said Claudia Nemat, board member for Europe and Technology at Deutsche Telekom, in a statement. "This is in line with our innovation goal of entering into partnerships to offer unique services that will increase both value for the customer as well as customer loyalty."
Emma Mohr-McClune, service director for global consumer services at Current Analysis, noted that partnering with OTT service providers is a hugely important global trend, with "dozens and dozens" of operator partnerships already in place.
Indeed, in the fourth quarter of 2013, Mohr-McClune said these types of partnerships were implicit in a quarter of new service innovations within Current Analysis' Innovation IMPACT database, although the bulk is still coming from the Asia-Pacific region.
Deutsche Telekom said the Evernote app will be pre-installed on portfolio Android handsets in 11 markets during the first quarter of 2014, with the Austrian market to follow early in the second quarter. Local language versions are already available in Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania, with the English language version of Evernote available for the remaining markets
Evernote currently has over 4 million users in Europe. The app allows customers to take notes, clip web pages, snap articles, create to-do lists and record audio using their mobile phones.
For more:
- see this Deutsche Telekom release
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