Colt heads east with launch of enterprise class cloud services in Asia

Colt Technology Services announces enterprise class cloud services in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. By joining together with KVH, Colt will now be able to offer enterprise customers the ability to deploy, manage and automate network and compute resources in both Europe and Asia, remotely from any location. As companies continue to look outside Europe for growth, Colt’s easy to consume Optimum Services for IT will enable its European customers to scale in line with business requirements, whether to underpin 24/7 global business operations, cope with fluctuations in demand, or to support expansion into new markets.

Simon Walsh, EVP, Colt, says “The expanding Asian markets are increasingly attractive for our European customers looking for growth opportunities outside of the euro zone. But this expansion creates a challenge for the CIO who needs to provide remote users with fast and reliable access to business-critical systems while at the same time complying with individual country data sovereignty requirements. This needs to be addressed without the significant CAPEX budget required to build infrastructure locally, or the time to seek out trusted providers in Asia. Colt can now meet customer demand for scalable services in Asia backed up with support in local languages, a single SLA and flexible commercials. Customers can be confident that IT can keep pace with the speed of business transformation but also pave the way for future growth.”

For European businesses looking to build their presence in Asia, finding the right service providers can be challenging. Colt’s easy-to-consume enterprise class cloud services in 10 data centres across Asia and Europe, together with the integrated KVH and Colt networks, remove the challenge of managing multiple service providers across continents. While ensuring that the relevant business applications are in close proximity to the end user, improving speed and performance of the user experience, Colt can also guarantee control over where sensitive corporate data resides, helping customers address regulatory requirements governing data storage.

KVH and Colt already collaborate closely. The use of common technology and systems allows Colt and KVH to easily deliver services to customers with consistent reporting and a single view of their compute and network resources. Irrespective of whether business applications are hosted in, for example, Frankfurt, Madrid or Tokyo, Colt customers will have a single SLA across all services with single currency pricing, making the procurement and operation of new services consistent across countries and continents.

“We believe our ability to link service management, network, server and storage provision to a flexible commercial framework via a simple service request catalogue across both continents is groundbreaking,” adds Walsh. “It brings simplicity for our customers and means that the CIO can deliver agile IT services in line with the business needs, removing the barriers that have historically existed to deploying traditional IT infrastructure projects fast, and releasing the in-house IT team from operational tasks so that they can focus their attention on strategic projects.”

Ted Higase, President and Chief Executive Officer of KVH, says, “As a result of years of collaboratively developing various infrastructure solutions with Colt, we are excited to offer customers in Asia a very powerful platform that simplifies and streamlines their expansion into Asia, and similarly for enterprises in Asia expanding into Europe. For a project that would normally require multi national corporates to leverage several service providers in different countries, we’re proud to offer this full package of managed IT services, compute resources, and storage capabilities throughout Europe and Asia on one unified platform with one point of contact.”

Fidelity has invested in both Colt and KVH to enable them to provide the same level of flexible, efficient and integrated IT solutions. Both companies offer enterprise customers a similar service portfolio and utilise common underlying technology. By working together, Colt and KVH can provide the same high quality and performance across Europe and into Asia with KVH and Colt fibre networks and data centres. This follows the recent Colt news announcing the largest enterprise class cloud footprint in Europe, available in data centres in the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland. In Asia the service is already available in Hong Kong and will be deployed in Japan and Singapore by the end of 2013.