Colt Rated as Leader for IaaS Offering by Both IDC and Experton
Colt Technology Services has received positive ratings for its enterprise Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering from both IDC and Experton. In IDC’s report ‘IaaS Competitive Landscape in Europe’, Colt’s IaaS platform and forward looking strategy are positively highlighted. German research, advisory and consulting company Experton positions Colt as a leader in its Managed Cloud, Managed Private Cloud and Cloud Services for the Midmarket quadrants in the Experton Cloud Vendor Benchmark 2013.
Scott Allen, marketing director for enterprise services, Colt, said: “Recognition from some of the industry’s leading analyst houses for the strength of our IaaS offering, differentiated by our combined network and datacentre footprint, is clear evidence that Colt is one of the leading providers of IT services for European business. As IT departments within our customer organisations focus more than ever on delivering services back to the business, we’ll continue to build out the capabilities of our Colt Optimum portfolio services in line with their business needs.”
The IDC study profiles and compares 28 IaaS service providers active in EMEA. It states “Colt’s platform is technically impressive and its focus on orchestration is forward-looking…We expect Colt to do well against pure-plays and traditional IT players that lack network assets, and against network-based competitors that lag in flexibility and dynamic development processes.”
Experton’s Cloud Vendor benchmark 2013 is based upon an evaluation of 133 vendors in the German market. Key criteria for both the managed cloud and managed private cloud quadrants include high platform automation, interoperability and 24/7 operations with “enterprise-grade“ SLAs. In the managed private cloud quadrant, Experton recognised Colt for IT infrastructure services such as computing capacity, storage and additional network and connectivity services.
In the Cloud Vendor Benchmark, Experton comments “The quadrant leaders have sufficient market presence and competitiveness, reflected in a good customer service through presales staff and account managers, solution architects and technical engineers, and also in their financial stability and innovation…The vendor’s long-term viability and cloud commitment within the corporate strategy and product roadmap is a decisive factor for this analysis.”
Allen concludes: “Today enterprise customers are demanding a different way to buy and consume IT. As our customers transform the way they do business, Colt’s Optimum services for IT are ideally placed to support that transformation from infrastructure services to a secure, fully-managed environment for business and web applications. We are playing a critical role in helping our customers address the challenges presented by the speed of change by creating compelling combinations of compute, network and storage with superior quality of service and flexible commercials.”
This endorsement from IDC and Experton follows Colt’s recent announcement that it has the largest enterprise class cloud footprint in Europe. No matter where and customers are on their IT services journey Colt gives them the choice of in-country and pan-European IT services across networking, colocation, IaaS, platform management, unified communications and secure management of business and web applications.
About Colt
Colt is the information delivery platform, enabling its customers to deliver, share, process and store their vital business information. An established leader in delivering integrated computing and network services to major organisations, midsized businesses and wholesale customers, Colt operates a 22-country, 43,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 39 major European cities with direct fibre connections into 18,000 buildings and 20 carrier neutral Colt data centres.
In 2010, the Colt Data Centre Services business was launched to deliver innovative high quality data centre solutions at a Colt or customer site. Our Innovative data centres are rapid to deploy, flexible and highly efficient.
In addition to its direct sales capability, Colt has four indirect channels to market; Agent, Franchise, Distributor and Wholesale which includes Carriers, Service Providers, VARs and Voice Resellers.
Colt is listed on the London Stock Exchange (COLT). Information about Colt and its services can be found at www.colt.net