Cloudscene recently sat down with Colt’s Director of Ethernet & IP Products – Peter Coppens – to discuss the company’s growth in the market, their plans for 2017 and the key issues affecting the data center sector. With a strong foothold on the European and Asia Pacific markets, Colt Technology Services (Colt) boasts a world-class network across three continents that is fully integrated with the cloud. With connectivity to over 700 data centers around the globe and 24,000 on-net buildings, Colt’s growth over the last decade has been exceptional leading them to be ranked as the #2 Service Provider on Cloudscene

In the last 12 months in particular, Colt has launched their first SDN-enabled service and the company’s cloud connectivity service has experienced considerable success thanks to the demand for secure and reliable connectivity to public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.At a market level, Colt’s Director of Ethernet & IP Products, Peter Coppens, said the growth of the cloud and OTT markets has driven an unprecedented period of expansion for the data center sector.“The industry’s growth is occurring at a time of consolidation, with a number of key mergers and acquisitions taking place and many players disposing of their data center assets. We’re also seeing the emergence of the hyper-connected data center where there is a high enterprise and cloud presence resulting in a significant demand for connectivity,” Peter said.In fact, data center connectivity is at the core of Colt’s 2017 strategy given the high concentration of enterprises, cloud and content providers in key markets which is driving the heightened demand on data center operators.“In 2016, we launched our first SDN-enabled service – DCNet on Demand – which provides real time provisioning and bandwidth flexing across leading European data centers. This means there is no more waiting for weeks for high bandwidth connectivity to be delivered between data centers – connectivity is now consumed online on a portal and delivered in real time,” Peter said.Colt believes that the data center connectivity market will move from a traditional fixed bandwidth network operator model to a real-time on demand environment.Peter explains, “We want connectivity services to be delivered in minutes, not days. We’ll be leading the journey towards this new model in 2017.”This year, Colt will be rolling out a new ultra-high bandwidth Colt IQ network platform across Europe and the Asia Pacific, an important foundation for the company’s network service offerings. Colt is also extending the DCNet service which will provide customers with inter-data center connectivity up to 100Gbps.With respect to industry trends, Colt reveals its top three changes affecting the data center industry going into 2017:

1. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which came into effect in 2016 has a significant impact on the way organizations are expected to treat data privacy. Businesses across Europe and indeed the world are needing to review their data management processes including respecting the rights for individuals to request access and/or erasing of their personal data or potentially face a €20m fine.

2. The introduction of the Green Grid Performance Indicator has been welcomed by most within the industry given the dissatisfaction with the “one-dimensional” view that PUE has offered to date. Known as the Performance Indicator (PI), the new measure combines PUE, IT Thermal Conformance and IT Thermal Resilience to collectively give a clearer marking system for examining data centers across organizations of all shapes and sizes.

3. Managing digital transformation has always been a requirement of the IT decision-maker however, the momentum of technology change such as the IoT, AR and VR is putting strain on both data center capacity and the skills and scope of IT Teams. Furthermore, the need for the ‘enterprise defined data center’ has in many ways truly come into the spotlight now.

Colt operates data centers in five of Cloudscene's Top Ten Colocation Ecosystems. For more information on Colt’s services, view their service provider profile on Cloudscene or visit colt.netCOLT REPRESENTATIVE:In his rol

e as Director of Ethernet & IP Products, Peter Coppens is responsible for aligning Colt's data network product portfolio to customer demand in Europe. Peter’s career spans nearly 20 years in the telecom sector. Prior to this role, Peter served at Alcatel-Lucent and Global One. Since then, Peter has been active in Colt for 16 years in various senior positions. Based in Benelux, Peter is responsible for pricing, business development and product marketing and management. Peter graduated from the Free University of Brussels as a Civil Engineer in Electrical Engineering, with specialization in Photonics and Optical Communications.If you’d like to find out more about the content of this interview or to participate/contribute to future articles, please contact Renée Harper, Senior Marketing Manager at Cloudscene.