COLT Group

Colt Group S.A

Type	Société anonyme in Luxembourg (LSE: COLT)
Industry	Telecoms, Managed services
Founded	1992
Headquarters	London, England, UK
Key people	Timothy Hilton, Chairman Rakesh Bhasin, CEO
Revenue	€1,583.6 million (2010)[1]
Operating income	€80.6 million (2010)[1]
Net income	€71.2 million (2010)[1]
Employees	4,825 (2010)[1]
Website	www.colt.net

Colt Technology Services (officially Colt Group S.A, formerly COLT Telecom)^[2] (LSE: COLT) is a telecommunications, IT managed services and data centre services company providing services to city-based large enterprise, small and midsize business and wholesale carriers throughout 21 countries in Europe. The group is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

History

Colt was founded in 1992 by Jim Hynes with funds provided by Fidelity Investments as City Of London Telecommunications.^[3] The company began to construct a telecoms network in London.^[3] In 1993 it was awarded a licence to compete with British Telecom and Cable and Wireless in voice and data transmission.^[3] It was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996.^[3] The group later expanded into Europe, building networks in major European cities over the next 10 years.^[3] In 2001 Fidelity Investments helped the Company to raise a further £400m to finance its future activities.^[4] In 2005 the company reached its first year of positive cash flow, and in 2007 its first year of profit. In April 2009 Colt completed an Open Offer raising €199.1m (including a €9.7m foreign exchange gain) before expenses with the issue of 211.0 million shares.^[5]In 2010 Colt rebranded from COLT Telecom to Colt Technology Services, deleting the acronyms of City Of London Telecommunications to reflect its paneuropean nature. Since then the company now describes itself as an ‘information delivery platform’ rather than a telco, to describe its move towards selling more integrated compute and network services.^[6] In May 2011 Colt acquired a majority shareholding in MarketPrizm, a provider of low latency market data and trading infrastructure services.^[7]

Organisation

Colt has offices in the following countries: Germany, United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Ireland, Luxembourg, United States, and India. The Company is registered in Luxembourg, but its main centre of operations is based in the United Kingdom.^[1]

In 2011 Colt organised ^[8] into three customer facing business units: Colt Enterprise Services, Colt Communication Services and Colt Data Centre Services. Two other service units support the customer facing arms: Infrastructure Services and Business Services.

Colt Enterprise Services

The Colt Enterprise Services business unit serves the needs of multinational and large national organisations typically with more than 1,000 employees. Sectors served include financial services, broadcast and media, legal and government bodies.^[1]

Colt Communication Services

The Colt Communication Services serves the needs of other operators by providing access to Colt’s European network and data centres. Through Colt’s extended network of 400 channel partners and 200 resellers it also serves midsize businesses typically with 30 to 1,000 employees.^[1]

Colt Data Centre Services

The Colt Data Centre Services business unit was launched in 2010 to deliver an innovation of the company, modular data centres,^[9] available on a Colt site or a customer site in Europe.]^[1]

Products and services

Colt specialises in providing data computing Data, Voice, Managed Services and Data Center services to major enterprises, small and medium sized businesses and wholesale customers. Colt operates a 35,000km network that includes Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) in 39 major European cities with direct fibre connections into 17,000 buildings and 19 ISO 27001 certified Colt Data Centers (located in 10 countries), as well as connecting a further 85 cities including New York, Boston, Newark and Chicago in the USA and Central and Eastern European countries.^[1]

Solutions

Colt provides solutions that help with cost control, risk mitigation, speed to market and business transformation. Colt’s Solutions portfolio can be split into the following categories – Data Centre Solutions, Small & Medium Business Solutions, Carrier & Reseller Solutions, Enterprise Solutions.

Data Centre Solutions

Colt provides modular data centres since 2010 which are deployed in 4 months and power efficient (1.21 PUE - Power Usage Effectiveness). Since May 2011 these Modular Data Centres are available in 125m2, 250m2, 375m2 or 500m2 increments, TierI to TierIV resilience options and different power ranges up to 3,000w/m2.^[10]

Small and Medium Business Solutions

Colt’s SMB solutions are delivered indirect by the company's channel partners in Europe and consist in flexible suites of services like Smart Office,^[11]a modular suite covering needs for Internet, business email and security through to PC backup and Voice over IP (VoIP).^[12]

Carrier and Reseller Solutions

To address their own end-customer demands, operators and value-added resellers complete their IT & network infrastructure footprint as well as their offering capabilities with Colt's Voice Interconnect, White-Label product, Backbone and Access Solutions.^[13]

Enterprise Solutions

Colt focuses on 3 enterprise solutions: Managed Networking, Managed IT Infrastructure and Services and Unified Communications & Collaboration.^[14]

Product portfolio

Colt’s Data services include Ethernet with notably Ethernet in the First Mile capabilities, Internet Protocol Virtual Private Networks (IPVPN), Internet Access and Bandwidth services. Colt also offers Managed Services including application hosting, infrastructure management, IT services, enterprise cloud computing, network and facilities management.^[1]

Colt provides a broad portfolio of voice solutions, including Voice over IP (VoIP) and non-VoIP services, Intelligent Network (IN) services, customer contact solutions, white label products and network partnering.^[1]

Colt is a Managed Services provider: Colt manages and assumes responsibility for providing a defined set of IT services to their clients. Colt is also a Cloud Computing provider. In September 2009 Colt Group, led by its CIO Mark Leonard set out to become a leader in managed services, seeing this as the future for the company. Amongst the services it expected to offer its clients were secure cloud computing. To prove a point Leonard and his team set out to improve their own IT infrastructure using the technologies and offerings they would offer clients of Colt.^[15]Since then Colt has launched throughout 2010 new storage services and Enterprise Cloud capabilities with EMC, TIBCO, Unisys and VMware including vCloud Datacentre Services, after enhancing its internal infrastructure through virtualisation and integration of computing assets, using vCloud Datacenter Services themselves.^[16]

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k} Annual Report 2010
2. ^ Colt name change
3. ^ ^{a b c d e} Colt History
4. ^ Fidelity Investments Agrees To Help Rescue Colt
5. ^ Annual Report 2009
6. ^ Is it a telco? Is it a cloud company? No it's Colt!
7. ^ Colt to buy MarketPrizm
8. ^ Colt to simplify organisation
9. ^ Inside Colt's modular data centre
10. ^ Modular data centres are cheaper to build
11. ^ Smart office
12. ^ Small and Medium Business Solutions
13. ^ Carrier and Reseller Solutions
14. ^ Enterprise solutions
15. ^ Managing Colt services
16. ^ Video of Colt's transformation to vCloud

External links

• Colt Official site
• Youtube Videos
• Twitter Channel
• MarketPrizm Official site