While it’s easy to lose track of time and forget where the first half of the year has gone, these past six months have been incredibly busy for Colt.
Colt entered the year with a full agenda, and the business has already marked some significant milestones in the first months of 2018.
The year kicked off with Colt’s CEO Carl Grivner speaking on a panel at the Pacific Telecommunications Council (PTC) in Hawaii. After returning from the conference, Carl penned a blog reflecting on the event and equally the year ahead, which unpacked the concept of digital transformation and why many businesses struggle with the process.
“For Colt, our overarching connectivity goal, much like digital transformation, is a moving target. There’s a lot more we want to do, so we can make sure that we will be the optimal partner and provide the backbone network to support transformation journeys for years to come. Because as cliché as the word ‘journey’ can sound – that’s truly what digital transformation is. It’s not a destination, not for Colt, not for anyone.”
Colt then went from the shores of Hawaii to the heart of Germany, where it ensured that the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) ran smoothly. Colt has been working with the festival for 10 years and by utilising the Colt IQ Network, and it’s On Demand proposition, filmmakers can transmit their films from Hollywood to Berlin in less than 30 minutes. As opposed to previously film reels being transported all over the city. The festival’s organisers are also able to scale their bandwidth up as the event approaches and then down again once the event is over for another year, generating cost efficiencies.
By the time March rolled around, Colt announced that in conjunction with the Global Leader’s Forum (GLF), PCCW Global and blockchain start-up company Clear, it had launched a Proof of Concept (PoC) that focused on the settlement of wholesale voice minutes. This PoC saw the two carriers use historical data in a bilateral trial that reduced the time taken to rate a call from hours to minutes. After the success of this initial PoC, Colt and PCCW extended the trial in early May to include a range of other carriers in a multilateral financial settlement of wholesale voice minutes using a live data feed. Participants include fellow GLF members BT, Telefonica and Telstra.
The first half of the year has also seen Colt further expand its On Demand offering, launching the service in both Hong Kong and Singapore in Q2. This expansion sees businesses in the region being able to take full control of their network, scaling high bandwidth requirements up and down in real-time, creating flexibility, agility and driving cost efficiencies.
This isn’t the only expansion that took place in the first half of the year, with Colt also launching its much-anticipated presence in the US. The North American expansion connects 13 major telecoms and cloud hub cities in the US and Canada, including key data centres in Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Ashburn, Newark, New York, Boston, and Toronto, with end-to-end capabilities on Colt-operated equipment. This sees Colt’s connectivity now reaching beyond 850 data centres internationally.
These expansions have been coupled with the announcements that Colt is focusing heavily on Intelligent Connectivity and ensuring we are connected to the key partners within the cloud environment. Colt recently revealed that we are now interconnecting with the cloud ecosystems of both Google and IBM.
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