Colt results put faith in managed services

Colt, the telecoms and network service provider is following a strategy of moving away from providing voice services to its business customers and instead becoming the provider of managed services and data services. Today’s interim management report on the third quarter demonstrates it’s the right strategy. Although no exact numbers were revealed, Colt chief executive Rakesh Bhasin said: “Data revenue and Managed Services revenue continue to grow, but data revenue growth was at a slower pace than in the third quarter in 2008, reflecting the impact of the current economic conditions. As expected, we continue to see strong growth in Managed Services whilst managing the decline in the in the voice products.” Colt reported revenues of 400.1 million Euros, which is down 4.9 per cent on third quarter revenues of 420.7 million Euros for the same period in 2008. Bhasin said this was due to slower growth in data and continuing decline in voice revenues. Mark Leonard, CIO at Colt recently told CIO that he is confident the increasing interest in cloud computing from his CIO peers will provide a stable future for growth at Colt. “The difference between the cloud and the managed service model is that managed services is an extension of your own environment. So you will have all the control as if it was in your datacentre, but without the cost of setting one up,” he said.