At the 2010 Regent Conference a year and more ago, I regaled the audience with a very personal view of how I thought the IT services world would look in 2020 (see 2020 Vision – IT Services: Visioners, Assemblers and Deliverers). I posited a fundamental restructure of the industry into three categories of players: Visioners (evolving from today’s consultants); Assemblers (nowadays often referred to as ‘service integrators’); and Deliverers (infrastructure provisioning). Visioners and Assemblers would be ‘asset light’ and rely on partnering with Deliverers to ‘deliver’ transactions (or, as I called them, ‘interactions’) to end-users.
Well, I think I may have found my first example of a real ‘Deliverer’, in the shape of Colt. Note – not Colt Telecom, as they were branded until a year ago. Just plain Colt. And they ‘do’ infrastructure, both network and IT. Their strapline, as I discovered when I met top management yesterday, is ‘The Information Delivery Platform for European Businesses’. Substitute ‘interaction’ for ‘information’ and there we have it – a true Deliverer!
Over the past couple of years, CEO Rakesh Bhasin has undertaken a major ‘refresh’ of the management team and re-plotted Colt’s course as a wholesale and retail supplier of network and IT infrastructure provisioning services. Earlier this year, Bhasin appointed ex-Computacenter UK MD, Simon Walsh, to run Colt’s European enterprise (i.e. ‘retail’) business (see Colt’s cloud challenge).
Bhasin has now eschewed any ambition for Colt to play directly in the traditional IT system integration and outsourcing game to concentrate on the ‘knitting’ i.e. infrastructure, shedding much of Colt's low-margin co-lo activities along the way.
There is much more to tell, and I am sure I will do so in future posts.