New partnership strengthens Colt’s cloud strategy

Francis is heading Colt’s new cloud services team for the indirect channel. The new team will bring together various key channels which focus on these services, and will promote the whole cloud portfolio through all of these channels.

The proliferation of cloud-powered IT services in businesses across Europe is difficult to ignore – where once there was distrust in the security of the technology, now companies of all sizes cannot afford to ignore the flexibility and agility provided by a cloud-centric IT services suite.

Increased cloud adoption is putting greater pressure on the channel to provide robust communications infrastructures and data centre services that can cope with the bandwidth demands of storage hungry applications.

SaaS and IaaS accelerate this demand, as businesses harness remotely accessible IT tools and platforms to bypass the need to maintain their own internal, and often costly, IT and communication infrastructures. A recent study, the Real IT Strategy Survey, revealed that the priorities for businesses in 2014 include having more agile and cost-effective IT operations strategies, further highlighting that it’s a buoyant market for channel players who can provide a whole range of competitive and ROI-focused services.

At Colt we have developed a cloud service strategy to deliver a complete platform to the channel consisting of a comprehensive networking, cloud and data centre package that will enable technology service providers to supply a full range of innovative IT solutions to companies extending from SMEs to large enterprises. 

Our recent partnership with Insight Enterprise is another milestone in our journey to take Colt Ceano to market across Europe and a proof point of our cloud strategy. The global IT hardware, software and services provider will be able to meet the needs of its 80,000 customers across Europe by utilising a range of Colt’s services including IP VPN access, Colocation, vCloud services, Cloud Storage and our newly enhanced Colt Ceano portfolio. By using these technologies as the foundation of InsightCloud, the company will be able to meet its customers’ requirements at every step of the IT lifecycle.

Insight will benefit from ongoing revenue streams and enhanced customer relationships, whilst its customers will benefit from access to Colt’s award winning services, underpinned by our extensive pan-European network and datacentre assets.

As trends such as big data and virtualisation help to propel the demand for fully connected and integrated IT services in business, the channel will need to evolve their cloud strategy in order to grab the new opportunities presenting themselves. Colt’s ability to offer cloud, data centre, network and ICT services in one streamlined package, presents IT providers with new revenue streams.