Colt Technology Services announced on Tuesday that its On Demand services are now available in the U.S., Hong Kong, Portugal, and Austria.
As the name implies, Colt's On Demand bandwidth service allows customers to spin up additional bandwidth as needed in near real time. It first launched in Europe two years ago and was rolled out into Asia Pacific last year.
“For years, Colt has focused on creating a backbone that is purpose-built for the technological challenges of today," said Colt's Peter Coppens, vice president of product portfolio, in a prepared statement. "This latest expansion to our On Demand portfolio, sees the network now truly behave in an innovative way, with enterprises being able to access high bandwidth, on-demand solutions across multiple continents, that can be delivered in minutes and then flexed up or down in bandwidth as needed.
“We have known for some time that the demand for high bandwidth connectivity isn’t slowing down and we are confident that the latest expansion of our On Demand solutions can meet this demand and continue to enable enterprises’ digital transformations.”
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While other overseas service providers, such as BT, also offer their services in the U.S, launching the On Demand platform in the United States is a significant milestone for Colt. In June, Colt first announced the launch of its U.S. network in 13 cities across 30 data centers after a little over a year of planning. The network connects to cloud hub cities in both the U.S. and Canada, which allows large multinational companies in North America to reach into the Colt IQ Network across Europe and Asia.
The Colt IQ Network connects over 850 data centers across Europe, Asia and North America, with more than 27,500 on net buildings.
Colt also announced new bandwidth offerings for its software-defined networking (SDN) On Demand portfolio. Colt is adding 100G ports in some of its critical data centers as well as end-to-end connections of up to 20 Gbps. Colt has also increased the number of on demand data centers to more than 250 globally.
Last year, Colt said it would be launching a universal customer premises (uCPE) service in October and then revised the launch date to early this year. Colt is working with Adva on the uCPE offering, which is also part of its on demand platform.
The uCPE service is the first phase of Colt's cloud-based, network functions virtualization (NFV) Stratus project.
The Stratus project is the culmination of Colt's work on NFV that dates back several years. Colt has taken a deliberate approach to how it is deploying and using both NFV and software-defined network across its on demand platform.
With uCPE close to deployment, Colt is also working within Stratus on network functions virtualization infrastructure (NFVi) to put compute capabilities at the cloud edge and then NFV orchestration over the top of all of the various functions and services.
The goal of Stratus, which was started early last year, is to move beyond basic connectivity by enabling value-added virtual network services (VNFs) that can be spun up or down in real-time.
In addition to Stratus, Colt's Novitas project, which started more than four years ago, handles the SDN orchestration, including automated real time service quoting, ordering and delivery, service capability development, and SDN federation.
The third leg of Colt's on demand platform is called Sentio. Sentio was designed to introduce automation in the service assurance space by using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Colt has conducted a proof-of-concept for Sentio with Ciena.
Colt offers its services in more than 213 cities across 30 countries.