vCloud from Colt – Customer and Channel Ready

Earlier this month I was delighted to present on stage at VMworld Colt’s new vCloud 5.1: I was joined on-stage by Tona Monedero (CIO of Codorniu, more of which later). I talked about our geographic rollout of vCloud, and how at Colt we now have a cloud platform that is fit for purpose when it comes both to end-user and Channel requirements (take a look at the short presentation below). The development work that Colt has done with VMware to bring vCloud to this new standard means that the system is easier to integrate and configure than ever before. For the Channel it represents a more manageable solution that has been previously seen.

At Colt we’ve opted to present our vCloud Virtual Data Centre services in two different flavours. Our “Enterprise” vDC guarantees a high resource availability with some burst capacity. “Enterprise” is a comprehensive package for a typical production IT requirements. We then also have an “Essentials” vDC package which focuses on guaranteed lower resources commitment level, but with a higher burst capacity. “Essentials” is better-suited for development, for disaster recovery or for applications with less performance sensitivity, giving you reliability but at a lower price point than “Enterprise”. For both of these vDC packages we’ve changed our price structure too, offering compelling value for resellers and customers. When you combine these features with the ability to access local vCloud instances in London, Paris, Frankfurt or Madrid and you have a very powerful, European-wide solution. Colt’s data centre estate is entirely based in Western Europe, ensuring that customer data never leaves the EU. However we can now configure solutions tuned to customer sensitivity about workloads and data within key national boundaries.

At VMworld we demonstrated two proof-of-concepts that we have developed after listening to our customers’ needs. The first is a vDC back-up solution from ourselves and Symantec powered by the latest release of the popular NetBackup technology, implementing a Back-up As A Service provision for resellers. The second demonstration is a replication and disaster recovery package that we created with Zerto. This allows us to provide real time replication within shared service (like vCloud) with recovery achievable within one click. It was great to be able to demonstrate both of these solutions, and to gain feedback from resellers and customers at our Colt stand.

Finally, I had the great pleasure of welcoming Tona Monedaro, CIO of wine producer Grupo Codorniu, to the stage to talk about her experiences of working with Colt and the vCloud service. Tona pointed out cloud infrastructure permits her to focus the skills of her team on managing vendors externally and managing business change internally; they no longer need extensive knowledge and accreditations in many of the constituent technologies. As such, Codorniu built their online store within a Colt cloud framework and predicted the increasing need for an IT partner that could deliver agility on the scale she needed. Tona’s comments really brought home to me why an internally-managed IT resource is no longer a viable option. Not only is it unnecessary to own the physical assets, but it is unnecessary to have all the lower-level technical skills on your payroll.

VMworld had a great buzz this year. We had lots of official programme content promoting the move to hybrid and public vCloud, but also lots of vendor and customer interaction demonstrating that the trend is well-established. Codorniu may be one of the early adopters, but their example will be rapidly copied by other smart mid-size SMB’s this year.