Colt Selects EMC Smarts

HOPKINTON, Mass. -- EMC Corporation, the world leader in information storage and management, today announced that COLT -- a leading European provider of business communications -- has selected EMC Smarts as the core analysis and impact assessment solution for its sophisticated networked infrastructure.

Smarts software is being deployed to manage COLT IP VPN Corporate, a comprehensive portfolio of managed IP Virtual Private Network (VPN) services. COLT is deploying Smarts with more than 30,000 network devices, encompassing Internet services, P2P IP VPN, leased line, ATM/Frame Relay and MPLS-based IP VPN.

With Smarts software, COLT gains end-to-end insight into how IT health relates to key business services. The solution automatically pinpoints service-affecting problems and calculates their business impact. As a result, COLT can maximize customer service delivery, lower operating costs and reduce business risk.

"Since 2000, we've relied on the automated intelligence of EMC Smarts to ensure the reliability and availability of our data centers," said Neil McRae, Director of Network Architecture at COLT. "Given the tremendous success of that rollout, we've now put the power of Smarts automated root cause and impact analysis to work with all of our IP services, including our powerful MPLS offering."

Smarts enables COLT's networked infrastructure to function at optimum efficiency by minimizing the impact of problems across its global IT network. With its Common Information Model and Codebook Correlation Technology, Smarts software not only automatically discovers every device on the COLT network, but also analyzes the relationships among these devices. The solution is then able to diagnose the root cause of Layer 2 and Layer 3 problems and build a real-time dashboard picture of the business impact of these problems.

"With EMC Smarts, COLT customers can now conduct cross-domain root cause analysis across their networks, systems and applications -- immediately determining each problem's specific impact," said Chris Gahagan, Senior Vice President, EMC Software. "By providing total visibility into COLT's IT infrastructure, we're improving the quality of service COLT offers customers. We're delighted that the company has put Smarts in charge of a function that sits at the very heart of its service differentiation strategy."

EMC Corp.