Colt's Blog

There continues to be a cacophony of marketing noise from technology vendors about their cloud strategies; while the announcements sometimes include messaging for their channel, many partners are still unsure of their future role in the industry. Nearly two years ago, Tim Harmon and I (Peter O'Neill here) published two reports on this, and earlier this year the Cloud and Technology Transformation Alliance (CCTA) reported that its survey of 229 channel partners in North America revealed that 13% of the partners still lack a cloud strategy altogether and 42% describe their strategy as “nascent” or “evolving.” CCTA also collected the alarming statistic that 65% of channel partners know that they’re losing business because of their cloud shortcomings; that is, the partners know that their customers are asking for cloud services but cannot react.

I have regular unofficial “inquiries” with channel partners here in Europe resulting from vendor-client engagements where I am involved in partner training. I offer my email address and am happy to invest my time in answering their inquiries because the questions I get from the partners informs and enriches my research. Based on these conversations, I can report that the picture in Europe is not much different than the above numbers. I usually give them this advice: Pick a project team of sales and support people — perhaps 5% of your workforce — and have them put together one cloud service version of an existing products and services. Sometimes that means switching vendors, but often the existing product vendor already has a cloud version available. When the team is ready, it should go out and sell the cloud version to new customers as a new branded service line. This project team will gain experience in how to sell, how to bill, and how to pay for the cloud service.

I am looking forward to discussing this and other hot channel topics at the upcoming Channel Focus Western Europe 2012 conference, which will be held on November 13 and 14 in Brussels. This event is organized by Baptie and Company, which hosts and manages many partner communities and services for tech vendors. I am sure that the event will be well-attended by senior executives working with the channel in the IT and telco industries — many have told me that they will be there.

My last observation on the topic of channel and cloud is to point out the great cloud strategy being executed by Colt Technology Services. My colleague Tirthankar Sen wrote a great blog post a few months ago about distributors and telcos not cooperating enough on cloud computing. Colt has made several moves in the last months to promote its VMware-, EMC-, and Cisco-based cloud offerings through a channel. In April, the service provider launched SmartOffice, a “franchise program” for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, targeting three to five partners per country. In September, Colt made two strategic plays: first signing up value-added distributor Magirus as its first cloud services distributor and then acquiring the vendor ThinkGrid, which provides cloud business management services such as billing. ThinkGrid also has a partner ecosystem that encompasses more than 300 partners that build and deliver public and private clouds.

What do you think? Are there other shining examples of cloud partner strategies you know about? Please let me know. As always, I’d love to hear from you on this and other topics. Always keeping you informed!

Peter

Earlier this month I was delighted to present on stage at VMworld Colt’s new vCloud 5.1: I was joined on-stage by Tona Monedero (CIO of Codorniu, more of which later). I talked about our geographic rollout of vCloud, and how at Colt we now have a cloud platform that is fit for purpose when it comes both to end-user and Channel requirements (take a look at the short presentation below). The development work that Colt has done with VMware to bring vCloud to this new standard means that the system is easier to integrate and configure than ever before. For the Channel it represents a more manageable solution that has been previously seen.

At Colt we’ve opted to present our vCloud Virtual Data Centre services in two different flavours. Our “Enterprise” vDC guarantees a high resource availability with some burst capacity. “Enterprise” is a comprehensive package for a typical production IT requirements. We then also have an “Essentials” vDC package which focuses on guaranteed lower resources commitment level, but with a higher burst capacity. “Essentials” is better-suited for development, for disaster recovery or for applications with less performance sensitivity, giving you reliability but at a lower price point than “Enterprise”. For both of these vDC packages we’ve changed our price structure too, offering compelling value for resellers and customers. When you combine these features with the ability to access local vCloud instances in London, Paris, Frankfurt or Madrid and you have a very powerful, European-wide solution. Colt’s data centre estate is entirely based in Western Europe, ensuring that customer data never leaves the EU. However we can now configure solutions tuned to customer sensitivity about workloads and data within key national boundaries.

At VMworld we demonstrated two proof-of-concepts that we have developed after listening to our customers’ needs. The first is a vDC back-up solution from ourselves and Symantec powered by the latest release of the popular NetBackup technology, implementing a Back-up As A Service provision for resellers. The second demonstration is a replication and disaster recovery package that we created with Zerto. This allows us to provide real time replication within shared service (like vCloud) with recovery achievable within one click. It was great to be able to demonstrate both of these solutions, and to gain feedback from resellers and customers at our Colt stand.

Finally, I had the great pleasure of welcoming Tona Monedaro, CIO of wine producer Grupo Codorniu, to the stage to talk about her experiences of working with Colt and the vCloud service. Tona pointed out cloud infrastructure permits her to focus the skills of her team on managing vendors externally and managing business change internally; they no longer need extensive knowledge and accreditations in many of the constituent technologies. As such, Codorniu built their online store within a Colt cloud framework and predicted the increasing need for an IT partner that could deliver agility on the scale she needed. Tona’s comments really brought home to me why an internally-managed IT resource is no longer a viable option. Not only is it unnecessary to own the physical assets, but it is unnecessary to have all the lower-level technical skills on your payroll.

VMworld had a great buzz this year. We had lots of official programme content promoting the move to hybrid and public vCloud, but also lots of vendor and customer interaction demonstrating that the trend is well-established. Codorniu may be one of the early adopters, but their example will be rapidly copied by other smart mid-size SMB’s this year.

Last Tuesday night, the Colt Innovation & Prototyping team, which I lead, attended the Market Gravity and Wired UK Corporate Entrepreneur Awards. The awards recognize and celebrate the achievements of teams who are working hard within large companies to deliver game changing innovation and growth. Colt’s team was shortlisted for “Best example of building an entrepreneurial culture”.

Beside the rebranding and reorganisation, Colt’s transition from a Telco to an information delivery platform has involved a change of culture around innovation. The very word “innovation” was in the past associated with risk, something to avoid at all costs. Incremental developments, with certain return on investment, were prioritised, and disruptive ideas didn’t find the time to be analysed and were culturally avoided. At the end of 2010 it was clear that the move from Telco to the broader ICT market, required innovation to be brought back into the core of the business. Part of the task was assigned to a new team: Innovation & Prototyping.

Formed in 2011 assembling talents that combine technical understanding and business acumen, the Colt Innovation & Prototyping team focuses on high risk / high potential ideas for new services. The team assesses such ideas, building prototypes to qualify market and implementation risks and to bring the “art of the possible” into the 18-36 months roadmap. We have been given a license to fail fast and fail cheap: at any time in the de-risking process, we discard unpromising ideas, while promising ones are brought to the attention of the product team, typically focused on maximising short-term revenues.

The team has been instrumental to the creation of a systematic, organisation-wide approach to scan external trends for opportunities and challenges. All ideas are mapped against an Innovation Radar, which is shared regularly, and external contributors, such as Venture Capitals, Vendors and Technology partners, are now being brought into the process. The team uses pervasive guerrilla and viral marketing techniques to embed a culture of intrapreneurship across the organisation, and to onboard Colt employees and customers on prototypes. Innovation is no longer taboo, instead it’s now on everyone’s radar.

After less than 2 years of existence, the team has already delivered great results. For example, we have opened a new market with Femto-as-a-Service, a proposition for mobile operators built in partnership with NEC. We have been instrumental to the due diligence of the recent ThinkGrid acquisition, and we have built a highly collaborative relationship with the product management teams.

Having been short listed for this prize makes me immensely proud of this team. These are exceptional individuals, that with a structured methodology, laser focus attention, permeating communication and a lot of courage, have brought Colt to compete with far larger organisations and R&D budgets. Congratulations to Telefonica Wayra, the award winner, and…watch out, cause we don’t give up.

Questions and comments are welcome, and you can follow me on Twitter: @alebyday

In the last few weeks I've met a number of CIOs at various industry events including the CIO Connect Annual Conference. The main recurring theme was “Where is the CIO role going?" driven by three major trends.

First is the emergence of Consumerisation and Bring Your Own Device. In her “Are you an adult at work? Lynda Gratton writes “There are indeed enormous opportunities for each one of us to use technology to significantly boost our productivity and indeed create greater innovation. Many of us are choosing to do this by buying our own technological tools rather than waiting for our company to do this for us.” Indeed, new generations are technology savvy and knowledgeable, and want to make their own IT decisions. “One size fits all” IT is no longer possible. Standardising laptops and hard disk images will be looked at as the ice age of IT. The same happened when personal computers landed in a mainframe world, and the changes will be as significant.

The second trend is the emergence of Software as a Service (SaaS): entire departments are adopting SaaS solutions without consulting the CIO, and it’s extremely easy for them to use their credit card to sign-up to an online service. Think of HR implementing the latest talent management SaaS solution or a sales department migrating to SalesForce.com. A large percentage of the IT budget is today spent outside of IT. Trying to regain control by locking down firewalls and implementing policies is not working. A collaborative approach is needed. One recurring phrase was “If users want to do it, and you tell them they can’t, they’ll find a way. You’d better give them a better and faster alternative.” The third trend affects the CIO more directly as we see the emergence of IT as a business enabler with the CIO having an active role in revenue generation, and ultimately a seat on the board. Trevor Didcock (CIO EasyJet) and Nick Beighton (CFO Asos) were illuminating with their descriptions of how IT brings inimitable success factors, such as cost to serve for Easyjet, and differentiation through availability of sheer range of products for Asos. And I don’t buy that this only happens in online businesses: the CIOs of Volkswagen and BMW are measured against how many cars are coming out at every single shift. Literally, it’s their KPI. IT is taking centre stage, moving to the core business of each company.

But where will these trends lead? A broad answer is emerging: the role of the CIO is evolving to cover both operational and business roles. The first is the responsibility for keeping the systems running, secure and efficient, and will be measured on cost; this will require embracing SaaS where appropriate, involving third parties and striking the right balance between mandating some IT decisions and taking a more consultative role for others. The second side is the CIO as business enabler. This will require leveraging IT to anticipate customer needs, to open new markets and engage with a broader audience. The consensus was that to be successful, CIOs need to embrace external innovation, from start-ups, peers that are leading the way and service providers that are doing things differently. Ultimately this latter role will become central for any kind of business, with the majority of the IT budget (someone was talking about 80%) being allocated to this.

This is an edited version of Ale by day

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.