London 18th June, 2013
Colt Technology Services has been selected by the Crédit Agricole S.A. Group to provide a network infrastructure based on Colt’s ethernet services. Known for its expertise in managed network solutions, Colt will partner with Crédit Agricole to help its migration from a MAN (Metropolitan Area Network) architecture provided by multiple vendors to a single network managed by Colt interconnecting 80 sites. This new 5 year agreement is a milestone in the long-term collaboration between the two companies. In effect, Colt becomes a partner of Crédit Agricole SA Group and all of its subsidiaries for the full deployment of secure, reliable and scalable network infrastructure solutions on a global scale.
Crédit Agricole Group is France’s leading retail banking group, and is one of the largest banking organisations in Europe. Operating in 50 countries around the world, Crédit Agricole is a leading partner to support customer projects in all areas of retail banking and specialised financial services including: daily banking, savings, mortgage and consumer lending, insurance, private banking, asset management, leasing and factoring, investment banking and investment.
With its cooperative and mutualist foundations, the Crédit Agricole SA Group continues to focus its development on stable growth serving the economy, and in accordance with the interests of its 54 million customers, 1.2 million shareholders, 6.5 million members and 160,000 employees.
For Crédit Agricole today, the notion of “Community offer”1, optimisation and quality of service are essential. A tender was launched in December 2011 to overhaul the existing national network infrastructure. Colt was awarded the contract in July 2012 in recognition of the way it had perfectly met the objectives of the redesign: to simplify and pool architecture and implement a governance system that would rationalise costs.
In addition to the new project to overhaul the national network, Colt has, since 2000, provided high-speed Ethernet connections to interconnect critical sites. Since 2011, Colt has also managed the WAN (Wide Area Network) IP VPN of the Crédit Agricole on a global scale, linking 18 countries including France, South Africa, Russia, Turkey and Hungary.
The solution designed by Colt will see large volumes of critical data, such as compensation and trading data passing through Colt’s national network infrastructure and ultra-secure broadband every day. The new MAN network will connect users across 80 sites in the province and the Ile de France to the Crédit Agricole Group’s data centre located in Chartres, and separately, the connections between data centres located in the Paris region (Clichy and Marcoussis), on behalf of the Corporate and Investment Banking teams (Crédit Agricole CIB).
Through this new facility, Colt’s solution has simplified the design of the infrastructure while leveraging existing investment. Besides the objective of cost rationalisation, the Crédit Agricole SA Group also has strong commitments to contractual commissioning and operational management to meet.
"We are delighted to be recognised by the Crédit Agricole S.A. Group as a partner. For twelve years, we have demonstrated our ability to evolve their network solutions in line with business needs, this reflects our desire to work with them to better develop a project framework and support the approach of Community Offer" said Ben Savage, Director Regional Sales, Colt Technology Services.
The deployment is presently underway and some of the network services are already implemented. Going forward Crédit Agricole Group SA and Colt have agreed to working together in order to establish a working committee for future projects, for example, in the deployment of a data centre.
About Colt
Colt is the information delivery platform, enabling its customers to deliver, share, process and store their vital business information. An established leader in delivering integrated computing and network services to major organisations, midsized businesses and wholesale customers, Colt operates a 22-country, 43,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 39 major European cities with direct fibre connections into 19,000 buildings and 20 carrier neutral Colt data centres.
In 2010, the Colt Data Centre Services business was launched to deliver innovative high quality data centre solutions at a Colt or customer site. Our Innovative data centres are rapid to deploy, flexible and highly efficient.
In addition to its direct sales capability, Colt has four indirect channels to market; Agent, Franchise, Distributor and Wholesale which includes Carriers, Service Providers, VARs and Voice Resellers.
Colt is listed on the London Stock Exchange (COLT).
For more information, please contact:
Press contacts
Colt, Helen Toft
DDI: +44(0)20 863 5015
Mobile: +44 (0)7855 301078
Email: [email protected]
Weber Shandwick, Tim Focas
DDI: +44 (0)207 067 0532
Mobile: +44 (0)783 5517 004
Email: [email protected]
1The concept of “Community offer”, specific to Crédit Agricole SA Group, aims to pool the needs of the various subsidiaries of the Group and to respond through a joint solutions framework.
Make Do
18 June 2013
Recent blog posts
Filassistance
Colt et Versa Networks renforcent leur partenariat stratégique en proposant SD WAN as a Service à leurs clients internationaux
