We all love a good romance. And while this relationship is just the business kind, sometimes it is still a match made in heaven.
During the Management & Operations broadcasts, we sat down with Hans Stiles from Colt DCS to talk about their technology-driven transformation, and how a key pivotal moment for this was partnering up with software firm FNT.
Based in Ellwangen, Germany, FNT provides management software for IT, data center, and telecommunication infrastructure.
“We like to have a small number of select partners and a really tight relationship. We started our journey with FNT back in late 2014, early 2015.
“We selected FNT as the replacement for our in-house asset management system. Off the back of the FNT implementation, we launched a new customer portal in 2016, and one big example of our customer-centricity was that it actually gave our customers a self-service portal.
“They could raise access requests, they didn't need to find our service desk or send us emails. They could manage their own authorized contact and access-list through that platform. It was a major jump in terms of user experience.”
Customer experience is obviously one of the most important aspects of any business. However, the collaboration with FNT was not only limited to improving the user experience.
“A few years later, we integrated FNT into our lead-to-build process, basically opportunity-to-cash, and FNT is now a part of our billing mediation, so another key system for us.”
From that point onwards, the relationship between Colt DCS and FNT became more committed, year on year.
“At the end of 2019, we signed a new longer-term commercial agreement with FNT. We took a new commercial agreement with an opportunity to perform a major re-architecture and upgrade of our FNT platform. We moved it to a new multi-cloud environment. We architected it with cloud-first principles and brought it up to the very latest version of the platform.
“2020 was a busy year for us. We also introduced a new service management platform for data center incidents and changes, and we integrated with FNT to provide automated customer instant notification which is another major customer-centric development. We could issue comms for an incident with the right information in the right language, according to a customer's SLA, in the format they wanted.
“In 2021, to support the sale of the 12 colocation data centers [to Atlas Edge], we had to perform quite an extensive amount of data migration and segregation which was again performed on the FNT platform to allow the acquired businesses to operate.
“And this year, we've launched a new platform called IPOs. It's an integration platform with FNT around it. Currently, we're in the process of looking at consolidating our data center, connectivity management, and Configuration management database (CMDB) into FNT to build further on that on that capability.”
So, could Colt DCS have managed this transformation without the technology driving it?