Colt Engage managed to catch up with Santa Claus before he embarked on his preparation for the busy Christmas season, and he was in the mood to talk.

"I'm in the mood to talk," he said, "And I want to talk technology. People think I run a traditional operation up in the North Pole, with lots of Elves doing everything by hand. No, we're a 21st century operation, and we're proud of it!"

Christmas has become a very technologically intensive time. Within the last decade the yuletide season has posed an increasing challenge to the world's communications networks, and that trend is set to continue and gather pace.

"Back in the day, people used to make one or two international calls to family on Christmas day," Santa said as he sipped a glass of rich Madeira, his feet up in front of a roaring log-fire, his iPad glowing on his lap, "But now everyone is on Facebook and Twitter and Skyping their relatives and friends while they're accessing TV on demand, streaming movies, and making the most of their tablet computers. For me it's the network that counts. It's vital to my operation."

Santa might or might not be a customer of Colt (we're contractually unable to confirm or deny rumours to that effect), but he certainly does make good use of his business-grade network connections. "We've sent up our own data centre here in Lapland and it's deep beneath the ice. We save a fortune on cooling, and the power is generated by Reindeer waste. It's a little smelly, but very sustainable. We scale-up our server capacity simply and easily with the help of our technology partners and then, when the Christmas season is over, scale it down with no downtime at all."

Santa is a big user of the cloud: "Yes, the cloud is great for us. We have in-house capacity for some of our applications, our Elf employment records for instance, but everything else is out in the cloud. It is, simply, Christmas-as-a-Service! Ho ho!" Santa chuckles and downs his Madeira, then pours himself another.

"We've also been working on a few Apps. I know there are a lot of out there which pretend to come from me, but none of them do. I don't need a GPS App on my SmartPhone! I've been travelling the world each Christmas Eve for hundreds of years without one after all! I know the way to every good child. No, my app helps me deploy my resources from the comfort of my sleigh - which is 4G enabled, naturally - and I can be in command of my logistics using one, simple interface."

Santa has also seen big changes in what children are asking for; "Gone are the days when they wrote letters asking for simple toys, now it's the Kindle Fire HD or the Nexus or the iPad mini, 3-D DS, XBox Kinect, and so on. With technology companies set to spend over $5 billion on advertising their wares, I've been stocking up! I'm looking forward to Connected Christmas and a Techie New Year! Be Good and you might just get what you want this year!"