Fidelity Investment Managers and Carphone Warehouse pilot major business improvement initiatives in low risk, low cost managed hybrid cloud environment.
12th October 2010
Colt, Europe’s leading information delivery platform, announces that it is working with Fidelity Investment Managers and Carphone Warehouse to trial innovative IT initiatives as part of its VMware vCloud™ Datacenter Services ‘pilot environment’. These proof of concept programmes are designed to enable execution of IT initiatives, which historically would have been prohibitively expensive or risky to deploy.
Colt is currently the sole European based partner with a VMware vCloud Datacenter Services offering, and these pioneering programmes with Fidelity and Carphone Warehouse are a first for the region. This initial phase provides both enterprise customers with the ability to change the shape of their own business with limited CapEx* costs. VMware vCloud Datacenter Services extend the logical boundaries of data centres, helping organisations leverage cloud computing services while preserving the security and control of their VMware environments.
Richard Oosterom, Managing Director, Colt Managed Services said: “Working with these important lead customers is the first step in Colt’s delivery of the VMware vCloud Datacenter Services offering. As Europe’s information delivery platform, we are uniquely positioned to leverage our wholly-owned network, data centres and IT managed services expertise to deliver an offering that lowers the barriers to cloud adoption. This enables customers such as Fidelity Investment Managers and Carphone Warehouse to quickly adapt to the rapidly changing enterprise environment.”
Carphone Warehouse is using the service to evaluate changes to their existing workflow process models in isolation from the live environment. The speed and cost of deployment gives Carphone Warehouse the agility to undertake this assessment faster than via a more traditional IT project model. By making use of the enterprise cloud environment, the company can reduce risk by understanding and testing how its modifications and upgrades will behave before committing them to their production environment. When the impact analysis is complete, Carphone Warehouse then has the added flexibility to either deploy the exact model on its internal servers, or within the Colt enterprise cloud service.
David Byrne, Director of Architecture and Design at Carphone Warehouse said: “We have a strong reputation for innovation in Europe, with the evolution of our business we are continually looking at ways to improve our efficiencies to be able to deliver new services and great value to not only meet customer demands but stay ahead of them. By working with Colt we can rapidly assess the impact of changes to our IT environment; this has great benefits for the business, our customers and our online channel.”
Fidelity Investment Managers, the international investment company, is working with Colt to test new software features and functionality before upgrading and deploying them across the business. This pilot environment provides Fidelity with a secure and flexible setting enabling them to make an informed decision before upgrading.
David Hefford, Head of Technology Infrastructure Services at Fidelity said: “The cloud model brings many challenges regarding security and compliance. We are pleased to be working side-by-side with Colt, whose agility, ability to innovate, and deep understanding of the constraints of working within the financial sector will be key to helping us address these challenges.”
For further information on Colt enterprise cloud – a VMware vCloud Datacenter Service visit: www.colt.net/vcloud
*CapEx: Capital Expenditure.
About the service
VMware vCloud Datacenter Services are enterprise-class hybrid cloud services that enables organisations to extend and migrate their own virtualised environment to a Colt data centre, with Colt providing a VMware-certified cloud that delivers flexibility, scalability, security and operational efficiency. Colt’s delivery of the VMware vCloud Datacenter Services will utilise its wholly-owned network, data centres and IT managed services expertise to deliver a first class enterprise cloud offering, backed-up with business level service level agreements (SLAs).
Colt partnered with VMware to deliver VMware vCloud Datacenter Services throughout Europe last August 31st. To read this previous announcement click here.
About Colt
Colt is Europe’s leading information delivery platform, enabling its customers to share, process and store their vital business information. An established leader in delivering integrated networking and IT managed services to major organisations, midsized businesses and wholesale customers, Colt operates a 9-country, 25,000km network that includes metropolitan area networks in 34 major European cities with direct fibre connections into 17,000 buildings and 19 Colt data centres. In 2010, the Colt Data Centre Services business was launched to deliver high quality innovative modular data centres which are, rapid to deploy and power efficient.
Colt is listed on the London Stock Exchange (COLT). Information about Colt and its services can be found at www.colt.net
VMware and VMware vCloud are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.
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