Colt the Conductor? Making progress on our IT Services strategy

As we enter the fourth quarter of the year, I wonder how you are doing with the challenges that you faced at the beginning of 2013?

At the start of this year, we set ourselves the task of improving awareness of the IT Services we provide for the enterprise market. Having been known for so many years as a provider of managed networking and voice services, we know that this will take some time. So how are we doing?

There were some building blocks to get right first. In the first quarter, we simplified our enterprise solutions into 7 Optimum Services to make our services and their benefits simpler to understand. The 7 services include Optimum Infrastructure, Platforms and Workloads and are delivered as combinations of compute, network and storage services with superior service and flexible commercials. The response from our customers suggests we are getting this right.

“Colt offered the right combination of service, flexibility, reliability and price. Each time we have a new business requirement, Colt provides the answer – making it easy for us to focus on expanding our services fluidly and achieving impressive growth.”
Tiberi, Nectar Italia

During the second quarter, progress was formally recognised by a number of analyst houses. IDC and Experton rated Colt as a leader for our Infrastructure as a Service and then Gartner named Colt as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for managed hosting in Europe.  
  

So far so good.

During the third quarter we met with a number of analysts to provide a deep dive into our IT services capabilities. We demonstrated how our customers are consuming our Optimum IT Infrastructure, Platforms and Workloads services via the Colt customer portal. I am really excited about the reviews that these analysts have written since and I’d like to share them with you.

Duncan Brown at PAC described Colt as a Conductor of Cloud services

Dan Bieler and John Rakowski provided a joint evaluation of our progress in their report titled Embedded connectivity adds new spin to Colt's IT offering

William Fellows at 451 Group published a report titled Colt Optimum: the telco gets its act together on IT services (subscription only)

And finally Mette Ahorlu and James Eibisch from IDC published a report titled Colt’s Strategy for IT Services and Cloud

We are still evolving to become the provider of integrated IT and network services that we want to be. But I think we’ve come a long way since the start of this year. We continue to listen to customer and analyst feedback to shape our services through regular customer satisfaction surveys, advisory boards and every face to face interaction we have. If you’d like to contribute to the discussion, we’d love to hear from you.