While Colt looks back on 30 years of delivering extraordinary connections, we sat down with Product Portfolio Vice President Peter Coppens to ask him where he sees the business heading.
“Predicting the future of technology is a tricky business”, says Peter. “30 years ago, many thought we’d be driving around in levitating cars and living on the moon. Instead, the internet and smartphones took those futurologists by surprise.”
Avoiding the risk of making predictions that ascend into the realms of science fiction, Peter is far more confident anticipating the methods in which Colt will provide services to customers. “Colt is already evolving into providing two vital modes of connectivity: giving enterprises the tools to consume, control and self-serve their connectivity needs, and on the other hand, managing their network on their behalf if they don’t have the resource or skills.”
Not many industries specialise in both approaches: helping a customer solve a challenge or enabling them to help themselves. Yet both complement each other, effectively covering the whole enterprise segment: from do-it-yourself inclined businesses to those that prefer to outsource.
Peter sees Colt at the forefront of consumption-based connectivity services. During the past decade, large parts of the compute, storage and hosting markets moved to the cloud, often consumed in a self-serve model and given the ability to spin up or down resources in near real-time and get billed for what they actually used.
Colt’s On Demand service is bringing that cloud consumption model to networking, allowing customers to take control of their bandwidth by scaling it up when necessary and dialling it back down when it’s not needed, without being tied into long-term contracts.
“Over half of Colt’s products and services today are directly related to cloud use cases”, he explains. “In the past, these cloud-based services would often have to be underpinned by static connections that were slow to implement and change. By introducing self-serve capabilities and automation, enterprises became more agile, took back control of their network, reduced sourcing costs, and were fully prepared for the digital transformation.”
Besides the consumption-based, self-serve model, the other avenue where Peter sees Colt growing is in providing integrated solutions. The network is important for all enterprises but it’s not always a business differentiator, and as such can be outsourced to a service provider. No two businesses are alike, where systems, applications, network providers and services all contribute to produce an unlimited amount of configurations. “These enterprises expect a turn-key solution – proactively managed for them – attuned to their specific needs”, explains Peter, going on to say that this approach is a necessity to remaining relevant.
Predicting the future might be tough, but planning for it with the right digital infrastructure is simple. With more connected buildings, data centres and cloud on-ramps across Europe and Asia than ever before – alongside a trustworthy fleet of industry partners – the Colt IQ Network will be the bedrock of your network so you’re always one step ahead.
To speak with us about any of our products or services, contact our Sales team.
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