Colt awarded Global Service Provider Partner of the Year by VMware

January kicked off a great start to 2014 when we were recognised by VMware as UK and Ireland Service Provider Partner of the Year, for the second consecutive year. And it seems the news keeps getting better, as last week’s VMware Partner Exchange in San Francisco saw Colt awarded Global Service Provider Partner of the Year!

This recognises Colt’s success and commitment to developing our vCloud service portfolio. As the first vCloud service provider in Europe three years ago, we were the first provider to implement a pan-European platform, allowing us to offer a flexible pool of computer, storage and networking resources to our customers as part of our overall cloud and IT services portfolio.

2013 saw us extend the availability of VMware vCloud Data Centre Services in Italy and Switzerland, adding to our existing estate in the UK, France, Spain and Germany. We also announced the availability of services from a second data centre in Spain. This enables us to offer customers even more geographical scope from which to access enterprise cloud services, addressing many compliance, taxation and IP challenges caused by the data privacy and contractual requirements associated with placing data ‘in the cloud’ across Europe.

We have also deployed VMware NSX network virtualisation technology in our Paris data centre, allowing us to deliver the software-defined data centre element. Through innovations like this we plan to virtualise the network from the data centre to customer premises to deliver managed IT services. 

Our reseller relationships are an important channel through which we offer vCloud to the mid-market and enterprise clients, and we have continued to engage with and grow this partner base over the last year. Colt’s cloud services are now available via ArrowSphere, Arrow’s cloud services platform for its channel community, including cloud storage and vCloud backup and recovery.

We couldn’t have asked for a better start to 2014. Being recognised as Global Service Provider Partner of the Year is a fantastic accolade and testament to the flexible, innovative, industry-leading portfolio of services that we have been able to offer our customers through our alliance with VMware.