Computacenter guru outlines new Colt not-a-cloud plan

How do you draw a 'delivery platform' on a whiteboard?

Computacenter's former storage boss Matthew Yeager is set to join LSE-listed Colt from next month as chief technologist.

After nearly four years at CC, Yeager is heading to Colt, which dropped the Telecom element of its brand last year as it transitions into a cloud services biz or "information delivery platform provider" as it prefers.

Yeager told Channel Reg, ahead of his 5 September start date, that Colt owns the bandwidth between data centres and that he would work with the team to "rapidly prototype the cloud".

"We are not a traditional telecom company but we are not a cloud provider either. We have aspirations to become an information delivery platform provider. The plan is to understand what the portfolio needs to look like," he said.

Colt has a portfolio of managed services – the fastest expanding element of its operation in 2011 – but growth was less marked in the six months to 30 June 2011, up 4.3 per cent to €86.6m as group revenues dipped 3.5 per cent to €766m.

Data revenues edged up one per cent to €400m but voice sales continued to slide, down 11.3 per cent to €279m.

Yeager reckons user businesses are less concerned about the badge on the box but want to talk about "identification, mitigation and transferral of risk" and a hybrid solution seems sensible.

"Customers still want choice about whether to keep certain data internal forever and always, move it to an external provider or use services through an application store that is secure," he added.

Yeager is the second big hitter from CC to join Colt following the appointment of former managing director of services Simon Walsh, who joined Colt Enterprise Services as exec veep. ®