Colt's Blog

As Partner Management Director at Colt I’m often asked about the real, underlying value that our technology partnerships deliver. In the past 18 months Colt has significantly restructured itself to accelerate progress towards being a next generation services provider.  So how do our strategic technology partnerships support this and what exactly do we get from them as a business?

Colt maintains several strategic partnerships, each with the capability to increase not only our technological suite, but broaden our service offering too. This is vital to Colt, in our progression to being the information delivery platform for businesses in Europe, beyond a manager of just infrastructure or a telecommunications network.

Our customers are demanding more in terms of service offering, flexibility in our provision and power, resilience and security from our products. Sovereignty, regulation and economic requirements also need to be addressed on a customer-by-customer basis. Our technology partnerships allow us to do that.

For example, our partnership with Cisco provides us with unparalleled power at the compute layer, giving our offering a reliable and strong backbone. EMC brings innovative and qualified experience to our data storage and back-up and our partnership with EMC has recently taken a new step with the award of Platinum Partner status and involvement with the launch of EMC’s VMAX SP. Our virtualisation services have been developed jointly with VMware and we’re currently showcasing our work at the VMware Forums that are taking place across Europe during May and June.

When you add these capabilities to our own vast low-latency fibre network, nineteen data centres and our expertise you have a very attractive proposition for customers and resellers alike. Together with our technology partners, Colt can work with our customers to address today’s business requirements with the right service coupled with the  latest advanced technology, and all the while remaining competitive.

I’m very much looking forward to bringing out the best from the technology partnerships that Colt has formed and providing the best solutions we can for our customers. More news to come!

Earlier this month at Colt we revealed internally that we were now the first to market with 120Mbps* over copper. This is a significant achievement for three reasons, firstly we now have proof-of-concept for the delivery of large amounts of data over copper at speed, secondly we’ve demonstrated how our ‘Ethernet over the first mile’ (EFM) technology can be adapted to a more loosely regulated environment and thirdly we’ve more than doubled the footprint of EFM enabled central offices in Copenhagen.

We chose Denmark as the location for this roll-out due to its unique regulatory approach to bandwidth for both DSL and EFM services. In most countries you’ll find a limit of 5.7Mbps set as a bandwidth limit on copper-based connections. What we’ve been able to do previously is ‘bond’ these connections together to provide greater EFM access, which is how a bandwidth load of 40Mbps is achieved. Denmark however raised the load limit to 15.2Mbps (an allowance that only applies to Actelis EFM equipment that we use at all our Central Office installations) this allowed us to once again use our bonding process to reach the 120Mbps mark.

This is great news for our expansion of services across Europe. The Copenhagen installation allow us to service organisations with bigger and faster data connections and help make the argument for more regulatory freedom within those countries that are still placing quite heavy restrictions on copper bandwidth use.

With services such as IP access, Ethernet and IP VPN all available using EFM, we’re once again leading the pack in network service delivery and access.

* Speeds available will differ based on product offering and distance to the customer site from the nearest Central Office

Colt turned 20 years old on Sunday 29 April and that’s made me think about how things have changed over the last two decades.

Back in 1992 the World Wide Web had a total of 130 sites and you had to dial in, BlackBerry was a fruit and you still listened to music on tape or CD.  There were no blogs, no Google, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Wikipedia and there were still nine planets in the solar system!

In 1992 you had to go to a store to buy something and you paid whatever price was on display.  You chose what to buy based on adverts and the recommendations of a few friends.  If you wanted to find people with the same interests as you, you went to clubs and your world was based on what was nearby.

Twenty years ago only a very few, forward looking companies had a Chief Technical Officer or Chief Information Officer and if they did they certainly didn’t sit on the executive team – technology just wasn’t that important to the running of the business.

Today everything’s changed - technology is at the heart of every business.  Everything runs on it.

From internal systems to stock ordering and logistics. From online payments to credit card transactions.  From data storage to real time data analysis. Transactions, communications, sales, record keeping – managing people, managing customers, managing shareholders – in fact, managing anything is all about the technology.

And, Colt sits right in the middle of this change  - and that’s very, very exciting.

Following on from my Ethernet Europe 2012 wrap-up post, here, as some of you requested, is my keynote speech presentation, for all to view.

Thanks to everyone made Ethernet Europe 2012 such a great show and for all the positive feedback that the above presentation received. As I’ve said before I’m delighted with the attention that the Service Wrap has had and we look forward to making it even better based on your thoughts and feedback.
 

It was both a privilege and a delight to attend Ethernet Europe 2012 this year, held in the great city of Munich. I was fortunate enough to deliver a keynote speech and as I mentioned in my previous blog post I focused on how Ethernet has evolved following the demand of customers and changes to requirements from the wholesale sector.

The gratifying part for me at least is that at Colt we seem to be getting it right. From the perspective of the Service Wrap, we’re certainly adding value to the overall proposition. I had a fair number of service providers tell me after my speech, that not all the value was in the technical specification, but the service from Colt was exceeding expectation. I’m delighted to hear that. You can hear me talking about the Service Wrap (and my lost luggage) here:

One of the larger areas of discussion during the two days was around Performance Assurance. It’s clear that many people want to see better defined supporting standards as well as tools designed for real usability when it comes to delivering performance guarantees. One of the key drivers is of course Cloud which places  vital demands on the network for Performance and Security. Ethernet services are seen by many as an ideal ‘partner’ for Cloud access.

Overall the two days afforded me a really good look at how we can further integrate with our customers to improve Performance, Service Wrap and increased value for Ethernet services. I look forward to seeing where we can take these exciting discussions.