Colt Expertise

A platform for the future

You want your communication and IT solutions - and its attendant strategy - to be a force for good in your organisation. You don't just want it to support your business; you'd like it to add value and to drive your business forward.

However, to reach such a point - even to achieve a state where your IT and communications environment empower your business rather than constraining it - you must know exactly how every component of your network and IT platforms work. Only then can you understand the options for the future - how to proceed, to replace, to upgrade and to enhance. Such knowledge is even more vital when one is dealing with the specific demands of a complex vertical such as media.

Your reasons for needing a new solution may be many and varied. You may just need your global platform performance enhanced. You may need to add specific managed IT solutions in order to meet a specific business challenge. You may have legacy shortcomings to address, for example:

• networks developed in isolation , with your IT network completely separate from your media content network
• networks upgraded in ad hoc fashion
• consolidation of networks, applications, protocols and formats proving unwieldy
• systems unable to support increasing workloads involving multiple and diverse formats
• lack of awareness of new cloud-based services and how they can benefit your business, or
• lack of digital storage solutions

Our media-specific consultants conduct thorough reviews of your current and future IT and communications requirements. They examine your infrastructure in its wider business context, reviewing operational, tactical and strategic issues.

Having reviewed your requirements, we will also offer as many solution options as appropriate. These will include a full cost profile. The solutions will focus on delivering the business benefits that you desire, which may include improved network performance, efficiency and resilience, streamlined costs, as well as future-proofing your investment.

This information will provide you with the decision-making platform from which to move your infrastructure and managed IT solutions forward.

Technical design for business benefit

Our dedicated design personnel combine specific media expertise with engineering and IT capability to design complex projects to exacting standards. Their mission is to produce a solution design document that defines exactly how our new or enhanced solution will drive your business forward. The objective of this enhancement could range from a standard network to an all-encompassing solution combining network infrastructure with managed cloud-based services.

The document will cover every design aspect, including:

• technical overview
• topology
• design aspects
• how the network and its traffic will be managed, and
• the integration of your network with existing or new IT systems and business platforms.

Colt's consultants use an industry-leading portfolio of products to design networks, network enhancements and fully integrated IT solutions for customers throughout Europe. Our industry-leading expertise is sought in the areas of managed services, data networking services and managed cloud solutions.

Customer testimonials have detailed benefits that include more reliable and secure transmission of critical information and content, and a substantially increased customer base.

By the end of the Colt Design process, you will have all the detail you need to progress to Project and Service Management stages.

Projecting. Your benefits

Our Project Management ensures that your solution is completed on time, on budget and to a standard that will maximise your long-term return on investment.

The highlights of our Project Management service are:

• business alignment - having examined your critical business challenges and agreed a strategic framework, our priority is to deliver a project which reflects your business objectives
• careful implementation - our Project Management will be precise in its implementation, mitigating risks whilst taking account of relevant sensitivities
• adherence to standards - we use pre-defined and agreed steps in every phase of the implementation. These are mandatory to ensure that all stages of the project are completed to the required standards, and
• responsibility - the whole implementation is co-ordinated by the project manager who takes end-to-end responsibility, from planning, migration and integration through to issue resolution and preparation of progress reports.

And the people behind our Project Management include:

• fully accredited project managers and recognised decision makers, delivering the required technology changes and managing the project so that business benefits materialise as soon as possible
• high calibre professionals to help ensure that every phase of the programme is completed to the standards you expect, on time and to budget
• an executive project board with over 10 years' experience of delivering complex projects, to oversee the complete project. All project board members are professionally accredited to programme level.

Safeguarding your investment

Service Management is the assurance that someone is always monitoring the performance of your solution. Service Management is Colt's ongoing commitment to your business performance.

This is an enhanced offering, delivered by a Colt service manager who ensures your new technology solution performs to its optimum, in line with Service Level Agreements. It is not just routine maintenance; it is our proactive commitment to go the extra network mile. It encompasses:

• the proactive monitoring of service levels
• direct access to a designated service expert all day every day
• a single point of contact to resolve issues swiftly
• appropriate escalation procedures in place 24/7, and
• the continuous monitoring of your solution and your business, to plan how the service should flex with your needs.

This level of support enables our customers to mitigate the effects of downtime, increase productivity and enhance profitability. You may even be able to reallocate resources as efficiency improves.

Our service managers are part of our multi-tiered support service, which includes service desk, service manager and specific customer reporting, to ensure that you get the support best suited to your business.