A post-VMworld view: why the integrity of business critical services really matters

By: Gary Moore - 21/10/2013

Gary Moore is Director of Colt's distribution channel. He is responsible for building Colt's business through the IT reseller community, with a particular focus on Colt's IT services portfolio.

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On returning from the VMworld event, I must say that I feel very proud of Colt's rapid progress in this market segment. We were able to exploit all of the hard work of the previous few quarters to present an industry-leading suite of services, all of which can be ordered today. Our extensive estate gives us a geographic capability to which others can only aspire (especially those who are now considering entering the market as Service Proivders).

The show attendance is characterised by three groups. The leadership of the main IT brands including VMware themselves are there. Then there are the other exhibitors. This year saw a preponderance of storage equipment vendors - surely there will be a shakeout there soon? And finally the majority of visitors are technical experts, updating their skills and knowledge of the world of virtualisation, and especially VMware's outlook on it. Colt's presence helps us to establish our brand with the first and last of these communities. Additionally, we met some end customers and partners, and it is valuable for them to see Colt in a prominent way in this eco-system.

Our expertise in business continuity is now well-established. We’re making great strides forward in our geo-centric capabilities, as we recently announced the extension of our key VMware vCloud Datacentre Services offering to key European markets in Italy, Switzerland, UK, France, and Germany. In a timely coincidence, in the run-up to this year’s VMworld, we also announced vCloud availability from our second datacentre in Spain, (coincidentally found in Barcelona) including in our launch of new cloud infrastructure backup and replication services for Value Added Resellers (VARs).

We now can also present to our enterprise and VAR clients a clear story in cloud migration and on-boarding solutions. We also now have a clear delegated infrastructure model for our VAR customers who require enhanced vCloud features from us as can be seen in our whitepaper published this week: Back-up and Recovery – Why you should expect the unexpected.

As a result, the team at VMworld 2013 in Barcelona was kept busy. Over four days, we managed to meet with a host of interesting stand visitors, not only existing partners and customers, but new prospects as well. We also took part in the thought leadership sessions, held every year at the Solutions Exchange Theater. We co-presented with one of our existing Spanish Colt customers ASM Web Services (ASMWS) to deliver a presentation on Colt’s vCloud journey and how our customers benefit from our expertise in IaaS. The presentation was well-received and if by chance you weren’t in attendance, I’m more than happy to be contacted (I’m @GaryMooreCloud on Twitter) or you can read the slides at your leisure here. Simon Walsh also spoke on a panel session on hybrid cloud solutions and how enterprise customers tend to consume cloud services, which was well received.

Nevertheless, Colt’s participation in VMworld was not only about brand awareness in the vCloud ecosystem. The show also provides us a great opportunity to hear from senior VMware leadership, and to ensure that Colt is still correctly positioned in their GTM plans. With the amount of VMware technology in our customer propositions and our own network environment, this is more important than ever.
 

Once again I’d like to thank all those customers and visitors who helped to make this year’s VMworld a success, and of course extend my gratitude to the Colt team for their continued commitment as we continue to grow our cloud infrastructure portfolio. I am looking forward to following through with the contacts we made in Barcelona.
 

 


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