Cloud Computing on Ulitzer

COLT, a European provider of business communications and managed services, today announced that the company has selected TIBCO's cloud software to provide organisations throughout Europe with the ability to deploy and manage enterprise applications across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures in real-time.

These enhanced Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings for cloud services will rapidly bring flexibility and scalability into the business, especially for organisations operating applications in high performance computing environments.

• The Managed Grid Service (PaaS) will provide a flexible but dedicated infrastructure for customers to power applications running in high performance computing environments.

• Ideal for both transactional and high performance computing applications, enterprise IT organisations will be able to manage a wider selection of business applications - and with greater efficiency - with In-life Managed Applications (PaaS).

In addition, customers will be able to set business metrics against their applications and, for those implementing dynamic infrastructure resourcing, scale the application to meet those metrics.

• Using a COLT private network connection, Grid Extension (IaaS) will securely expand existing infrastructures by allowing a large number of resources to be attached.

For organisations operating in markets where high performance computing environments are common place, such as investment banking, insurance and oil and gas industries, this will enable greater agility and capacity management, while also facilitating a move to a more efficiency-based operating cost model.

To optimise service performance in real-time, businesses will be able to leverage built-in support for Service Level Agreement (SLA) management, enforcement, tiered access and compliance.

The new services being delivered by COLT will be rolled out in a staged approach during 2010, with introductory services available to beta customers prior to general availability during the second quarter of 2010. Additional upgrades will also be introduced throughout 2010.

Maggy McClelland, Managing Director of COLT Managed Services said: "Our new offerings provide customers with the assurance and security needed for enterprise-class grid services, combined with the benefits of cloud computing. This capability will enable CIOs to deploy cloud services, whether private, hybrid or public, on a strategic rather than tactical basis."

Jamie Bernardin, Vice President, DataSynapse Product Group, TIBCO Software Inc. said: "We believe these capabilities will provide COLT with a differentiated, first-mover advantage in the emerging cloud services industry. When launched, COLT will have the first platform as a service offering in the European enterprise IT market with these capabilities."

This announcement enhances COLT's growing presence in the enterprise cloud arena. In July 2009 COLT introduced its first cloud service, Managed Workspace, and in January 2010 it announced the availability of its Cloud Infrastructure Services.

For more information about COLT's services, please visit www.colt.net/managedservices. For more information about TIBCO DataSynapse solutions, please visit: www.tibco.com or www.datasynapse.com.