Complexity gets in the way of doing business. Everyone accepts that, but it takes a lot of effort and imagination to achieve simplicity.
Colt has won an award for doing just that. A project designed to enable global recruitment consultants, Michael Page, to communicate more efficiently across its offices in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Turkey scooped the Global Telecom Business Innovation Award for 2011.
As business thinker E.F Shumacher once said, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius…to move in the opposite direction!” And Colt’s team managed to do just that.
Michael Page, founded in 1976, moved into Europe in the 1980s and has since expanded its operations globally. With ever expanding amounts of business users in 12 sites across Spain, Portugal, Italy and Turkey they were in need of a solution to enable them to cope with new applications easily and without disrupting operations. The company had also experienced quality issues that, despite regular bandwidth upgrades, had not satisfied the needs of users. So the company asked Colt to come up with a solution that would avoid a constant cycle of upgrading bandwidth.
Colt suggested an innovative approach: an application-aware network with in-depth application-level visualisation and optimisation capabilities. This simplified the allocation of bandwidth and applications, and even enabled any errors to be sorted out without the need to call in specialists.
Using technology from French company, Ipanema Technologies, the Colt team delivered a solution that gave all concerned a far more responsive and intuitive communications experience.
Michael Page can now rely on a single provider to manage an end-to-end solution that uses cutting-edge technology, improves the productivity of their people and the efficiency of their network. And that, in turn, helps the company compete profitably across Europe.