The end of the year is nearly upon us and what a fantastic year it has been for Colt.
Earlier in the year we shared our achievements up until July, and the last six months have been equally as exciting for the business; with some huge events taking place.
August saw the announcement of two key SDN launches; the expansion of Colt’s SD WAN capabilities across the Asia Pacific region and North America as well as the launch of our On Demand offering in Singapore. Colt’s VP for Product, Peter Coppens, spoke about the extension and explained how it will allow organisations to truly evolve and grow in the modern business landscape.
“Through Colt’s SD WAN and On Demand services, organisations can now take full control over their agile, high bandwidth network in the way that best suits their business needs. It’s such technology, that Colt believes, truly allows organisations to undertake the digital transformations required to thrive in the business environment of today.”
From agile technology to agile riders; September saw the return of the Colt Charity Bike Ride, which took 120 Colties from 16 countries on a journey from Milan to Rome, travelling a distance of 680km across five cities. They raised an incredible €118,000 for a number of different charities, with this year’s efforts taking the total donations accumulated across the seven Colt Charity Bike Rides to over €1 million Euros.
October was a particularly exciting month at Colt with two network expansions in Europe being announced. The expansion in Dublin saw a further 150km of additional fibre being put in the ground, in a city where Colt already connects more than 350 buildings and 23 data centres. The Colt IQ Network presence in Berlin was also increased with 100km of additional fibre being added, connecting more than 500 on net buildings.
Blockchain was also a popular topic during October; with the successful Proof of Concept (PoC) launch with Zeetta Networks and the completion of another PoC – this time in partnership with the GLF, Clear and PCCW Global. Both of these trials looked to significantly lower the cost of business-to-business interactions for network service providers and increase the efficiency of the market.
The second half of the year has also seen Colt Japan become the first provider in the region to connect to the IBM Cloud Direct Link Connect locally. This partnership gives enterprise customers the ability to establish a private network connection from their own infrastructure to the IBM Cloud.
With December now upon us, it’s also great to see that even more exciting expansion news has just been announced. Colt has recently revealed that it’s extending the Colt IQ Network to Central and Eastern Europe, with this expansion set to connect major hubs in the region with more than 7,000km of new fibre infrastructure. The cities which will be connected include; Sofia (Bulgaria), Zagreb (Croatia), Brno (Czech Republic), Prague (Czech Republic), Budapest (Hungary), Krakow (Poland), Warsaw (Poland), Bucharest (Romania), Belgrade (Serbia) and Bratislava (Slovakia).
By looking at this list of achievements it’s hard to deny that Colt has had a strong 2018. However, such announcements are laying the foundation for Colt to have an even stronger 2019. With many emerging technologies dominating the news headlines such as 5G and IoT, Colt is in a perfect position to be able to power the drivers of the future. We’re also able to do this without taking our eyes off our overarching focus of providing agile, high bandwidth connectivity. So here’s to 2018, we couldn’t have done it without the support of our suppliers and customers, and we’re excited the see where the next year will take us.
What's your goal today?
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