Colt announces €500m network cash injection

Colt Technology Services has revealed its cunning plan to fuel growth including a three year, €500 million investment in its network, as well as a refreshed approach to customer experience.

Earlier this week, Telecoms.com spoke to CEO Carl Grivner on his grand-plan to de-diversify the Colt business under the mind-set of ‘do one thing, and do it well’, but a €500 million investment shows there is some walk to accompany the talk. €200 million will be ploughed into the Colt IQ Network, it’s SDN driven network, over the course of 2017, as well as defining a new approach to customer experience.

“We are fortunate to not have many of the distractions of our peers, such as wireless, consumer and content,” said Grivner. “This means we can focus on building an intelligent network to meet the businesses requirements of today’s demanding enterprises. In fact, we believe our customers, and indeed all our competitors’ customers, should be more demanding of the industry. We are up for the challenge and we are confident we will deliver.”

Colt claims the investment in the network in 2017 will triple the number of sites across the Colt IQ Network capable of providing 100G enabled Ethernet and IP connectivity, and optical services up to 9.6Tbps capacity per site. The focus of the newly-defined business will be data-intensive businesses, irrelevant of size, in Europe and Asia, with little attention paid to the Americas or Africa.

Alongside the investment, Colt plans to redefine its own approach to customer experience, leaning on the success of consumer brands. Grivner told us customer experience has become mundane and stagnant across the industry in recent years, as companies focus more on chasing the diversified business model than the core components.

Learning from the success of brands such as Amazon.com, the team want a tablet or mobile to be the primary interface for customers. Telecoms is traditionally one of the more complicated industries, however scaling back the interface to an eCommerce style experience will greatly simplify and, in theory, improve the customer interface.

Millennials and the new wave of decision makers don’t want to speak to people, so the industry needs to react. Consumerising the experience is a top priority for Colt.

“You’re still going to need people, because there will be customers from my generation that don’t want to talk to a machine, or maybe there will be situations where the problem is too complex so you need a person,” said Grivner. “But certainly the generations which are behind me think that it’s the tablet that is the primary interface.

“They want to work on their tablet on not necessarily speak to anybody else. That is the generation which is entering the market place.”

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