Colt Technology Services, in partnership with Equinix, Interxion – a Digital Realty Company, AWS, Google Cloud and Axians, has provided Decathlon, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, with a global platform for digital services.
Colt is supplying connectivity for Decathlon’s regional hubs in Europe, Asia, and the US in the form of a high-bandwidth backbone to link multiple public clouds and SaaS services.
To accompany its cloud journey, Decathlon has needed a centralized network solution compliant with high availability standards, its digital strategy and its worldwide expansion. The retailer required a faster way to deploy best-in-class digital products while continuing to expand business. It additionally needed to cut the cost and burden of managing its own data centres.
With Equinix and Interxion/DLR as data centre partners delivering colocation sites, AWS and Google Cloud as cloud partners, and Axians, delivering remote hands, Colt has provided a holistic global solution that answers these needs and guarantees end-to-end performance, security, monitoring, and visibility while delivering outstanding service levels and support.
With the new solution in place, Decathlon will now be able to:
Stay ahead of the curve in the dynamic retail landscape;
Reduce management costs and overheads;
Develop unique and memorable digital experiences for customers
shopping in-store, online or via mobile apps;
Maintain the fast pace of its global expansion by bringing new sites onto the network quickly and efficiently;
More easily interconnect with partners, suppliers and cloud service providers;
Anticipate future benefits such as the accelerated adoption of additional cloud and SaaS services.
Decathlon now has on demand network connectivity that can be provisioned within minutes instead of weeks or months. That means an optimal quality of connectivity in the form of dedicated lines backed with SLAs, high availability at the level of 99.99%, better performance with users located closer to cloud providers, and scalability as a result of connections that can be upgraded in less than a day.
“Decathlon now has a secure, flexible and unified platform to support our cloud applications, allowing us to focus on network scalability automation; our goal is to build a predictive network based on user needs. New skill sets around NetOps, Network Data Analyst will be necessary to fulfil this ambition.” said Matthias Castelain, Head of Network at Decathlon. “Colt’s on-demand services give us a single pane of glass for ordering and deploying network connectivity. And with less reliance on in-house IT infrastructure and the use of Equinix’s world-leading data center facilities, we can also cut costs and complexity.”
“Decathlon needed a supplier who could deliver a holistic solution with consistent levels of service, quality, security, and resilience, with best-in-class after-sales support which enhances their user satisfaction,” said Andrew Edison, EVP Sales, Marketing and Customer Relationship Management at Colt. “We have given them the flexible bandwidth they need to scale up and down in line with workload and consumption patterns. They can now ensure low-latency connectivity across multi-cloud environments in AWS and Google Cloud, and use our software-defined network infrastructure for fast, frictionless ordering and provisioning of new connectivity.”