This year has been a busy and exciting one for Colt.
We expanded into new regions, participated in industry first trials and enhanced our products and services – bringing them to even more enterprises.
We can’t quite believe 2019 is already ending, and we wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on what the last twelve months have seen Colt achieve.
We kicked off 2019 with the expansion of our IQ Network into a new continent: Australia. This expansion announced in January, saw new routes between Australia and key Asian hubs being opened-up and has allowed our customers to further take advantage of the burgeoning region, as well as the broader reach and density of the Colt IQ Network.
In February, we named Mark Gilmour as our Head of Mobile Connectivity Solutions. With this newly created role indicating Colt’s increased focus on enabling Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) to better take advantage of the Colt IQ Network.
April, May and June were particularly exciting months for our network capabilities. First, we worked with Cisco to simplify the delivery of 5G backhaul services – deploying Cisco’s segment routing and Ethernet VPN based architecture adding further flexibility to the Colt IQ Network ahead of the advent of 5G.
We also announced that Colt was expanding our award-winning On Demand offering. Businesses in the United States, Hong Kong, Portugal and Austria as well as existing locations across Europe and Asia Pacific can now take full control over their network, flexing bandwidth up and down in real-time.
2019 saw collaboration also being a big focus for Colt, and that’s exactly what was at the centre of our partnership with AT&T. In June, Colt and AT&T became the first to implement MEF LSO Sonata APIs successfully to automate network ordering. AT&T’s business customers can now place automated orders for Colt’s Ethernet connections; improving service qualification and ordering times from days or weeks, to minutes.
August brought with it the next Colt IQ Network expansion, this time into Kyoto and Kobe in Japan. It was the latest in a series of network rollouts and expansions over the last couple of years in the US, Spain, Dublin, Berlin and Eastern Europe.
Also in August, we announced that enterprises can now connect directly, on-demand to Google Could globally.
As the summer wound down, 130 Colt employees, supported by a crew of 40 volunteers, geared up to cycle 540 kilometres over four days, across Germany and Austria, as part of the Colt Annual Charity Bike Ride. Now in its eighth year, the Colt Bike Ride raised over €340,000 for 16 children’s charities across the world. Smashing last year’s already impressive fundraising amount.
The last few months of this year have been as busy as ever, as we launched our universal customer premises equipment (uCPE) solution, furthered our collaboration with Microsoft and upgraded our IQ Network, significantly uplifting core network capacity. Our uCPE proposition enables a move towards virtualisation and edge computing, further putting the network in the hands of the customer, with the flexibility to license, manage and monitor functions with a choice of network options.
Our deepened relationship with Microsoft means that we’re able to also offer enterprises more choice around their cloud connectivity; connecting via public internet, via dedicated connectivity or, now, via the Azure Peering Service.
Finally, in October we announced that we have deployed of the most advanced optical technology to our network – Ciena’s market-leading WaveLogic Ai technology. For Colt, it means a significant increase in the Colt IQ Network capacity, and the opportunity to continue to evolve its product portfolio to support the requirements of high bandwidth solutions. For our customers, it provides high bandwidth, reliable and flexible connectivity that supports their digital transformations today and in the future.
The above is just a snippet of what Colt and its people have achieved this year. As an organisation, we are continuing to focus on enabling enterprises digital transformations – by providing agile, on-demand, high bandwidth connectivity. We know that with this network backbone, we can transform the way the world works through the power of connectivity.
We’ve had a great year and an even better decade and we can’t wait to see how our ambitions continue to evolve and grow into 2020.
Colt Technology Services
11 December 2019
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