1.4 Main focus areas for products and innovations

The disclosures made in the subsection “1.4 Main focus areas for products and innovations” are “non-audited management report disclosures”, as the content of “non-management report-related disclosures” is not audited.

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. Also within the context of its own sector, research and development expenditures play a fairly subordinate role. 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 centers (especially in Karlsruhe, Berlin, and Bucharest) with around 3,800 programmers, product managers, and technical administrators (corresponding to around 35% of all employees), 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 rollout minimizes its reliance on third party development work and supplies in many areas, and thus ensures decisive competitive and time-to-market advantages.

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 enhancing existing processes in order to raise system reliability, and thus also customer satisfaction.

Focus areas 2024

Consumer Access

  • Since the launch of mobile services in 1&1’s mobile network in December 2023, 1&1 has been producing advance services for new customers in its own network; wherever 1&1 does not yet have sufficient network coverage during the network rollout, it uses national roaming advance services; since the beginning of 2024, existing 1&1 customers on third-party networks (and thus on a wholesale basis) are being gradually migrated to the 1&1 mobile network
  • Implementation and launch of 1&1 Cinema as a video-on-demand service; usage via TV app or together with IPTV
  • Expansion of products, ordering options and services for business customers and set-up of a new platform for landline products at Drillisch Online
  • With the introduction of a new contract model, customers in the mobile sector have the opportunity to benefit from lower monthly prices for hardware: instead of the previous 24 months, hardware costs can be spread over 36 months; the longer term reduces the monthly costs
  • With the launch of the Unlimited on demand tariffs, 1&1 customers can now sign up for a reasonably priced mobile flat rate. Customers receive a basic volume of 50 GB and can top up with as many packages as they like for free if the selected basic volume is not enough

Business Access

  • Expansion of footprint for internet access products with up to 10 Gbit/s and launch of new process for automatic bandwidth upgrades for fiber products
  • Launch of a fiber-optic product based on XGS-PON technology with an innovative zero-touch provisioning process
  • SD-WAN Compact based on the Lancom platform, specially designed for retailers and companies with multiple locations
  • Managed firewall focusing on companies affected by the KRITIS and NIS2 regulations
  • Hardware portal for ordering phones, headsets, or adapters and launch of 1&1 set-up service and further professional services for cloud telephone systems

Consumer Applications

  • Customer account protection through improved AI-based anomaly detection
  • Use of GMX and WEB.DE app as two-factor authentication for logins
  • Improvement of AI-based prospecting in advertising through success evaluation and increased reach
  • Extension of new e-mail web client, including the sending of large files
  • Launch of an alert dashboard in the web e-mail client with security-related information
  • Launch of “United Internet Media Ad Manager” for internal and external booking of online campaigns in Switzerland and Austria and as a white-label variant
  • Development of a new mail storage system based on a distributed storage network
  • Introduction of the eSim-based free tariff GMX FreePhone
  • Development and launch of the “UIM Whitelabel Ad Manager” for B2B customers of the IONOS Group for booking online campaigns within the mail inbox on WEB.DE and GMX
  • Introduction of an offline credit card in the cashback world, with which customers can also collect WebCents offline
  • Launch of a new e-mail collection service for integrating mailboxes of other providers with support for the latest authorization protocols

Business Applications

  • Launch of AI-based assistant within the e-mail product
  • Launch of an AI-based domain search for the Arsys and Fasthosts brands
  • Launch of an AI-based chatbot for customer service in Germany and the UK
  • Launch of a multi-modal AI inference platform (AI Model Hub)
  • Launch of a domain expiry pool to improve the monetization of domains no longer required; using automated processes, these domains are offered to specific customers and can be made available for sale through Sedo
  • Introduction of shared web hosting products for Wordpress based on a scalable and high-performance new hosting platform
  • Launch of a legal protection service at several IONOS subsidiaries for the legally compliant creation of websites in compliance with the legal framework
  • Launch of advertising options (inbox ads) for IONOS customers in the email inboxes of GMX and Web.de
  • Rollout of the Bare Metal Cloud product at the Niederlauterbach data center to serve the French market
  • Rollout of a build-to-order service for dedicated servers in North America; enabling customers to configure their server architecture with the appropriate hardware themselves
  • Launch of a private DNS solution
  • Launch of an S/3-compatible object storage system with high scalability and redundancy based on Ceph
  • Launch of Managed MariaDB and Managed Redis with administration, maintenance, and scaling of these databases provided by IONOS
  • Launch of Logging-as-a-Service (LaaS): a cloud-based platform for managing infrastructure and application logs
  • Launch of regional control planes for Managed Kubernetes to improve the availability and reliability of customer clusters and to enable greater flexibility in the regional allocation of the control level
  • Expansion of the Managed Kubernetes (MK8S) platform in US business to offer customers a wider spectrum of managed Kubernetes services and Kubernetes clusters and raise their scalability and flexibility
  • Development of an “airgapped” cloud solution in an isolated environment for ITZBund
  • Introduction of a bidirectional VPN for secure management of resources in the private cloud