Colt wins VMware Service Provider Programme partner of the year for UK & Ireland

It’s a great start to the year for Colt. Last week my colleagues Jon Bennett and Gideon Wilkins accepted the VMware Service Provider Programme partner of the year 2012 award for UK & Ireland on behalf of Colt.

This award reflects our success in developing our vCloud based services and is testament to the true partner relationship we have with VMware, and the speed with which we are able to take these new services to market.

Colt was the first vCloud service provider in Europe two years ago and has maintained that lead by being the first service provider to implement a pan-European vCloud platform, based on the new VMware vCloud Suite 5.1. It was rolled out in four locations in Europe during 2012 and gave us the most extensive vCloud coverage in Europe, enabling customers to access enterprise cloud services from local data centres. This is important for our customers because it allows them to store their data in their operating country, addressing the myriad of compliance, taxation and IP challenges caused by the data privacy and contractual requirements associated with placing data “in the cloud” across Europe.

As this reward recognises, we continue to be committed to developing excellent vCloud based services for our customers as part of our overall cloud and IT services portfolio. We do this because we believe in the value of the technology and the support that VMware is offering to provide customers with the flexibility and scalability that today’s IT department needs to respond to business requirements. The deployment of a multi-tenant VDI platform (which won Best Desktop Virtualization project award at VMworld), a pan-European split-site solution and vCloud as Disaster Recovery are all examples of how Colt is using VMware-based solutions to enable our customers’ business.

In addition to our European roll-out, 2012 saw us engaging with IT resellers to offer vCloud to the mid-market as well as to our enterprise clients. This was a brand new approach and an example of the continued commercial innovation from Colt that has proven successful, and offered our distributor partners (Avnet/Magirus) and resellers great advantages to market.

Channel is now one of the key drivers for our roadmap. We have been developing new solutions and are working closely with VMware in order to offer our customers back-up and disaster recovery services. These prototypes were first demonstrated at VMworld Europe in Barcelona in 2012. From initial conversations with customers we know that these updates are critical offerings for the mid-market customer.

A great start to 2013. We look forward to continuing to build on this momentum with IT services that really help our customers maximise the performance of their business.