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!

Last month, I was fortunate to be representing Colt at Tradetech 2012, one of Europe’s key events for bringing together the trading community to discuss burning issues and take a look at new products and services.

The show was well-attended from buy-side and sell-side with plenty of burning topics to be discussed and created the opportunity to meet up with existing customers like the London Stock Exchange, further discussions with potential customers and talk to analyst houses  like the TABB Group to get their view on the market. Among the most popular debates were speculation about emerging markets, how technologies such as low latency can help shape the future of the HFT industry and the increasing appetite for wireless. But it was regulation that truly dominated the conversation with many people looking for direction as to when regulations would come into force and what that means for operational risk management. We decided to ask our own questions about regulation. When we took a straw poll of visitors to the Colt stand, we found that:

•    61% think that regulation will have the greatest impact on HFT in 2012
•    86% think that regulation will increase infrastructure spend during 2012 and 2013

The results are no surprise and highlight the expected impact of regulatory changes on IT operations.


At the show we were delighted to reveal the great news about a new route ourselves. The new ultra low latency link between the NYSE’s data centre in Basildon and Frankfurt will provide traders with a reduction in data transfer times of up to 10%. It generated a lot of interest from the press and market participants alike but it is only the first in a series of new ultra low latency routes that Colt is announcing in 2012 to help clients trading on multiple exchanges across Europe to execute trading strategies faster and better. We were really pleased with the response from the market to our news; it reinforced our believe that Colt is really leading the way and that’s a great position to be in as we celebrate our 20th year of providing connectivity to the financial services market.

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.