Meetic makes 400 new love stories happen every day

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Europe’s leading online dating service relies on Colt to keep people meeting

The Meetic Group has grown rapidly since its first users met online more than a decade ago. Today it’s an undisputed leader in the market: its dating sites, which include match.com and neu.de, serve more than 800,000 members in 16 European countries. In France alone, a million couples have met each other through Meetic in five years and almost 400 new love stories emerge every day.

“We’re an internet-based business so the security and availability of our websites is critical,” says Meetic’s CIO, Olivier Siegwart. “On average, each of our members spends more than an hour a month on our site. Just one hour of downtime would cost us in excess of 50,000 euros in lost revenues, to say nothing of the negative impact on our users and our reputation.”

“In all the years Meetic has been working with Colt, there hasn’t been a moment of downtime. Even when Meetic was subject to a DDoS attack, Colt’s internet security services enabled the business to continue operating.”

16-fold growth in less than a decade calls for high scalability

When Meetic first approached Colt, in 2004, to take over its hosting requirements, the company’s operations were supported by 50 servers. The business was growing, but couldn’t predict how fast. So Siegwart couldn’t say exactly how much more data centre capacity they’d need, nor how soon they’d need it.

Colt had the ideal proposition: a pay-as-you-grow hosting model that provides the scalability Meetic was looking for. “Over the years Colt has easily kept pace with our business as we’ve expanded, both organically and through acquisitions. IT has never been a barrier to growth,”says Siegwart. Colt is now hosting 800 servers that underpin Meetic’s dating websites throughout Europe.

Even when it had only 50 servers, Meetic knew it needed a disaster recovery solution. They considered using an alternative provider for the second data centre, but realised that would only add complexity and slow down development projects.

“Colt offered an ideal active/active solution based on two data centres in Paris that are connected by very high-speed links,” says Siegwart. “It’s like having a single virtual data centre, which makes everything very easy to manage.”

How’s this for responsive!

The nature of the working relationship with Colt has always been an important factor for Meetic. “When we started out, we were so small that none of the big providers were interested in working with us, but Colt was different,” recalls Siegwart. He continues:

“Colt is so approachable: we can talk directly with senior people who are empowered to make decisions. They’ve always responded quickly to our needs with the right solutions at the right price.”

That rapid decision-making and responsiveness continue to underpin the relationship. When Meetic identified the need to enhance its customer  relationships by launching a customer care helpdesk, it wanted to act quickly despite the scale and complexity of the undertaking. The company set out to hire and train 50 helpdesk agents within a fortnight. But it would have all been for nothing if Colt couldn’t do its part.

“Colt kept up with us,” says Siegwart. “They implemented a managed contact centre service, complete with intelligent routing and toll-free numbers, in 11 countries, in just two weeks.”

Meetic now manages over 150,000 calls per month through Colt’s Customer Contact Management service. This ensures the avoidance of high international connection charges, and through a single management point, all traffic information and statistics from across the region can be viewed, and customer calls can be managed with specific route plans, in real time.

The importance of never standing still

The relationship between Colt and Meetic has continued to grow. Today Colt provides almost all of Meetic’s IT and communication services in Europe, not just its data centre and contact centre services, but also its corporate wide area network across seven European cities.


“One of the things we like best about Colt is that they continually develop and improve their services.” Olivier Siegwart, CIO, Meetic Group.

One example was Colt’s application of ITIL best practice to its service management process – a development that Meetic was implementing at the same time. It gives the two companies a common language and framework for infrastructure management and has boosted the strength of the partnership which began in 2004.

The next step for Siegwart is likely to be exploring with Colt what cloud services could mean for Meetic. “It’s great for us that as we take each step to deliver better services, Colt is there with a portfolio of solutions to help us,” Siegwart concludes.