1.4 Main focus areas for products and innovations

As an internet service provider, the United Internet Group does not engage in research and development (R&D) on a scale comparable with manufacturing companies. Against this backdrop, United Internet does not disclose key figures for R&D.

At the same time, the United Internet brands stand for high-performance internet access, solutions, and innovative web-based products and applications which are mostly developed in-house. The success of United Internet is rooted in an ability to develop, combine, or adapt innovative products and services, and launch them on major markets.

Thanks to its high-performance development teams, United Internet is able to react swiftly and flexibly to new ideas and trends, and to continuously enhance its established products by adapting them to changing market needs – a key success factor in the fast-moving internet market. The Company’s expertise in product development, enhancement, and roll-out minimizes its reliance on third party development work and supplies in many areas, and thus ensures decisive competitive and time-to-market advantages.

At United Internet’s own development centers (especially in Karlsruhe, Berlin, and Bucharest), over 3,000 programmers, product managers, and technical administrators (corresponding to around 31% of all employees) use mainly open source code in clearly defined and modeled development environments. Third-party programming services are also used to swiftly and efficiently implement specific projects. This enables the Company to quickly develop products and adapt them to changing customer needs. United Internet also procures solutions from partners, which are then modified according to needs and integrated into its systems. With the aid of its self-developed applications, United Internet has a set of modules which can be easily combined and provided with product-specific or country-specific user interfaces in order to create a variety of powerful and integrated applications – a huge benefit when tailoring products to varying target groups, or for international rollouts.

Due to the steady growth in customer figures, the demands placed on reliability and availability are constantly rising. In addition to the further development of existing products and continuous optimization of back-end operations, the Company also focuses on continuously enhancing existing processes in order to raise system reliability, and thus also customer satisfaction.

Focus areas 2020

Consumer Access

  • Launch of a fiber-optic gigabit tariff for home users
  • Development of a new “IPTV application” for smart TVs based on Tizen/Samsung
  • Expansion of streaming options for IPTV users from 3 to 4 parallel streams
  • Introduction of a process for the marketing and installation of Apple Smart Watches with LTE and E-SIM in cooperation with Apple and Telefónica

Business Access

  • Launch of standard fiber-optic products with bandwidths above 1 Gbit/s for business customers
  • Convergent city network planning in conjunction with new contingent contract for FTTH advance services of Deutsche Telekom
  • Further network expansion to become a multi-service network
  • Performance increase by means of a new coherent optical line system for the multi-service core
  • Further expansion of the multi-tenant / connected building service

Consumer Applications

  • New cloud functions in WEB.DE Mail app
  • Launch of letter notification by e-mail in cooperation with Deutsche Post
  • Expansion of big data platform via centralized big data hub
  • Expansion of Smart Inbox with additional use cases: contract recognition, social media and newsletter detection

Business Applications

IONOS

  • Start of Private Cloud powered by VMWare, including Intel Scalable CPU with Optane technology
  • 10G speed for Intel Scalable Bare Metal Servers
  • Introduction of Cloud PBX with integration in MS Teams for collaboration and voice services
  • Repositioning of Managed Wordpress
  • Launch of MyWebsite NOW – section-based web builder for easy website creation
  • Launch of new website design services
  • Expansion of eCommerce portfolio with addition of social & CMS features
  • Launch of video chat solution
  • Certification of mail archiving according to IDW PS 880 (audit of software products)
  • Expansion of mail archiving to MS Hosted Exchange as well as external “non IONOS” mailboxes
  • Launch of MyBackup as “multi-device” backup solution with solution partner Acronis
  • Upgrade of VPS packages (extension vCore, RAM and SSD as well as launch of RAM-optimized packages)
  • Development of an efficient implementation of the Tier IV Uptime Institute standard, which is being implemented for the first time in the new UK data center
  • Continuous improvement and rollout of the Global Scrubbing platform to defend against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
  • Development of an IONOS-specific optimized hardware platform for servers and storages
  • DC power supply and liquid cooling to optimize energy efficiency of the data center
  • Expansion of dual vendor backbone to 100G speed (first multi-100G/200G connections in operation)
  • Development and launch of a customer management and project dashboard for the IONOS partner portal

STRATO

  • Launch of MySQL databases deployed via the IONOS WaaS MyQSL platform
  • Mail archiving certified according to IDW PS 880 (audit of software products)
  • Launch of a mail validator to check the authenticity of an e-mail from STRATO

Arsys

  • Integration of Arsys into IONOS hosted exchange platform
  • Integration of an SAP HANA platform into Arsys CloudBuilder