Colt's Blog

Why does the IT industry assume that 'self-service' is always the way to go? When we speak to our clients, it's frequently not what they want — at least, not if self-service means self-provisioning.

They certainly do want flexible and on-demand services. They want the ability to order, deploy, report on, manage and fix their IT services quickly and efficiently. But they want choices about how to make it all happen. They don't want to be told that they can't talk to anyone, that they have no choice but to go online and that they have to do everything themselves.

Two models of IT service: one size doesn't fit all
The tendency to push everything to the customer, irrespective of whether it's the most efficient — or their preferred — way to get it done, has its roots in the first on-demand cloud computing services. For many people, cloud computing is still exemplified by services such as Amazon's that cater to a huge market in an undifferentiated way, leveraging self-service as one strategy to keep costs down. In this model, delivering good service depends on developing the service to cater to the majority. Individual preferences or differences are not the guiding principle.

We would argue it's a perfectly valid service model, but not the best one for an enterprise service provider seeking to help clients manage high levels of service back into their organisation.

Our clients are looking for ways to simplify the delivery and management of complex IT environments that usually comprise a mix of in-house and outsourced, on-premise and off-premise services. More than anything they want seamless end-to-end visibility and control of these different resources and delivery models, and to be able to choose where they want direct control and what to leave to us.

Orchestration across service models
This calls for a different model of service, focused on giving the customer as much transparency as possible, and the tools to respond flexibly to changing business expectations in highly efficient ways. You need the ability to orchestrate across different IT environments to deliver service to your business, confident that the underpinning technology, service and commercial elements will come together in the way that you need them to.

For us, helping you to achieve this is what service is all about. Self-service — for any element of IT delivery and management — is certainly a choice you should have in achieving this; but it's not the only one.

In general, the legal department isn’t always associated with innovative ways of providing services, but here at Colt, we’ve taken a good, hard look at how we provide those services to our business for our internal and external customers, to enable the business and support our company’s growth. Any initiatives we have taken over the last few months support this, and it’s great to receive positive feedback from the wider industry about those. Indeed our in-house legal team was shortlisted for the prestigious awards within the legal industry from the FT. I have received many positive comments from my peers during the ceremony and our achievements were highlighted in the FT report.

Some of our key initiatives have been:

Colt’s legal practice embedded in our business agenda
Europe’s fragmented legal and regulatory landscape plays to Colt’s strength. And with Colt’s expertise in delivering IT and network infrastructure and services across many European countries, comes associated knowledge in dealing with local and country legal and regulatory landscapes, especially around the growing cloud computing offerings. Our legal team are working with business to develop new services and the commercials needed to support them.

Working across geographies
We have also transformed Colt’s legal team with an SLA-based legal services model, with colleagues in our India Shared Services Centre supporting our European operations. The creation of the Shared Service Legal team has significantly strengthened the legal function and is strongly aligned with our business objectives- be they revenue enhancement, the development of new business models, the use of technology for processes institutionalisation or efficient cost management. The team in India runs most of our operations support needs, and up to 30% of all legal work, for example providing a data protection help desk for first line support for issues across our EU markets. This supports the efficiency of our team in our European geographies tremendously.

A new way of working with legal firms Moving from multiple providers across Europe to a single preferred supplier has not only given us certainty of cost around many of the legal services we offer, with fixed rate services, it has also allowed for a stronger partnership and visibility into the business for our primary advisors, Baker & McKenzie. They have a depth of knowledge about our business, while we can obtain legal advice in any of our jurisdictions at short notice through this network. With more than 13 countries to cover, this access and support is invaluable. This innovation on our collaboration led Baker & McKenzie to win the FT award for the most innovative firm in client service, and I had the privilege to receive a note from Gary Senior, Baker & McKenzie’s London Managing Partner, which I’m proud to share with you: “Our win is really the win of our joint teams. This arrangement is only really possible because our teams work together to make it work. We also think that your own innovation and vision laid the platform for us to create something special with Colt. We very much value the relationship and all that working with you and your team has brought to ours.”

The growth in cloud-based services predicted by IDC comes as no surprise. The fact that these services will account for 16% of all IT spend will make IT channel partners sit up and take note as it presents a significant threat, but if action is taken it presents an even bigger opportunity. There are many in the channel that have recognised this shift and have started adding cloud-based services to their portfolio; as well as expanded managed service offerings to ensure they can keep up with a shift towards consumerisation of IT and demand for more flexibility, performance, mobility and reduced IT costs.

At ThinkGrid, we have built our three-fold channel proposition - platform tools, services and enablement - with this market shift in mind. To be successful in developing cloud services revenue takes three key components: tools; consumable services; and the right enablement and business processes. With regards to enablement, this is key to partners getting traction quickly and ultimately building a profitable business. Here is our approach to making that happen:

Business Consulting – is the first step towards partner enablement. ThinkGrid’s team will work closely with the partner to plan the market approach and set-up the necessary processes for a smooth transition towards a cloud-based business model. A growth plan covering target market, service launch and opportunity support is put in place to ensure the partner is on track. The whole process and end-plan will take into account the partner organisation type; Value Added Resellers, Distributors, Franchisees and Agents, their capabilities and their customer base.

Training Programmes – ensure the Partner’s various business functions – sales, marketing, operations and technical – start building real capabilities in the area of cloud computing. Interactive presentations, videos and documents will be made available, covering everything from the basics of understanding and positioning cloud-based-services, customer education on the benefits of cloud computing, to more complex issues such as integrating services with existing IT infrastructure, billing & provisioning and more broadly how to structure a sales organisation around recurring, Opex-based revenues.

Go-to-market – consists of editable product and solution collateral that Partners can customise, to build their differentiated or vertical value proposition for the SME market. Channel Partners can at this stage successfully conduct a cloud readiness assessment for their customers and deliver the most appropriate cloud-based services as part of a public, hybrid or private cloud solution.

The thin line between the opportunity and threat that the increasing growth in cloud-based service adoption brings lies with partner enablement and how fast they can build capabilities in the area of cloud computing, retaining or gaining the trusted advisor status on the market. ThinkGrid is committed to becoming the channel’s trusted advisor on cloud computing. By working with Colt’s existing capabilities and European reach, this will further develop our enablement programme, expand the portfolio and we are confident we will achieve the desired result for us and the Channel.

Historically most Service Providers, especially for their business offerings, have been installing multiple devices on customer premises to deliver Internet access or IPVPN services over diverse WAN transport technologies. Beyond the higher unit cost and more complex service delivery and assurance, this additional CPE router also constrained customer services.

Colt Technology Services has partnered with Juniper to deliver an industry game-changer: virtual CPEs.

With Ethernet becoming the universal transport method in the WAN and thanks to high-performance integrated Carrier Ethernet/IP devices like the Juniper MX it is now possible to deliver IP capabilities from the network turning the Provider Edge into the Service Edge. Virtual IP CPEs will allow for more dynamic bandwidth management, in-life change of service characteristics and more rapid introduction of new features enabling dynamic hybrid networking and network simplification.

But that’s only the first step in Colt’s Network Layer Integration strategy. Going forward vCPEs will evolve into cloud-based virtual CPEs: leveraging virtualized infrastructure vCPEs - a software instance in the cloud - will deliver more advanced routing, security and application-level services and facilitate scaling. Doing this in software will also open the door to more advanced Network Programmability.

In the same way that the advent of cloud and consumerization services drove major evolutions in the industry, virtual CPE'swill also spark an important change in SP’s operating models and innovation in commercial service wraps. I believe that these building blocks are critical in delivering a next-generation, integrated, flexible and cost-effective compute and network experience to our customers.

There are major changes underway in the delivery and consumption of IT services that will impact everybody in their personal and business lives. While the effects are being felt already in the design of new devices, software development, data centre design, IT and network provision – there are three underlying trends that will carry these changes into 2013:

• The software defined data centre
• The software defined network
• The consumerisation of IT and the growth of information

All this is being driven by the concept of virtualisation. At the recent VMworld conference, VMware stated that over 50% of workloads are now running in virtualised environments. It can now be argued that virtualisation is the norm for running applications. This movement to abstract functionality away from underlying hardware is one of the major drivers in IT and will continue well beyond 2013.

The advantage of virtualisation is that once something (a server, a firewall, a network) is defined in software – it can be controlled by software. This control can be exercised at various levels. For example, the cloud model of Infrastructure-as-a-service , Platform-as-a-service and Software-as-a-service. The question which will stretch into 2013 is who will manage which levels and why?

Traditionally the IT department has been the instigator/builder/manager/operator of IT for the enterprise – providing everything from the datacentre to the desktop. As virtualisation separates the layers, it makes it easier to separate responsibilities – for example, some infrastructure activities can be managed by specialist providers who can bring automation and economies of scale to bear; some ready-made suites of software may be delivered directly to the line of business – the cloud operating model.

Eventually, IT will be perceived as a service to be consumed by the end-user – either internally-provided, externally-provided or more-likely, by a combination of the two. But all of this will need to be brought together and co-ordinated. This brings us to the other emerging trend – orchestration.

At each level of abstraction, many interdependent components, both physical and virtual have to be started/stopped, tracked, monitored, changed and managed. As control moves beyond a single data centre and beyond the organisation boundaries, these elements need to be deployed to ensure they meet corporate, regulatory and social responsibilities. All this needs to be orchestrated to deliver the best value and, most importantly, the right information to and from internal and external consumers. To quote Daryl Plummer, Managing VP of Gartner, at the recent Gartner Symposium in South Africa in August 2012, “Technology is not the point anymore; what matters is how we use it to deliver a certain outcome.”

Here we see how the growing consumerisation of IT, with employees bringing their own devices and applications to work heightens the need to control and manage (software control) the data centre and networks to deliver the best experience possible. This convergence of end-user device management with software controlled networks and data centre infrastructure is what we at Colt call the Information Delivery Platform. You will be seeing a great deal more about the Information Delivery Platform in 2013.