COLT Wins Bank Deals

LONDON -- Nomura International, the European subsidiary of Japan’s leading investment bank, has selected COLT as its preferred network supplier to deliver data and voice services to its employees across Europe. As a result of the deal, Nomura, whose financial services business relies on real-time and secure communications with clients and colleagues around the world, will benefit from significantly reduced supplier numbers and a more cost-effective offering, as well as a higher performance network, for its mission critical business applications.

Ian Buchanan, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Nomura International said: “At Nomura we pride ourselves on our pioneering sprit and our position at the forefront of our industry. As such, we constantly seek ways to improve our service delivery and efficiency. We believe that COLT’s wholly owned, high performance network will help boost our pan-European operations. These kinds of enhancements to our network will ensure that the performance of our mission critical business applications is optimised. These factors, together with COLT’s customer care record, make COLT an excellent selection as our European network partner.”

For data communications, COLT has connected Nomura’s offices in eight countries – the UK, Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg and Switzerland – with its market-leading managed Ethernet service, COLT LANLink Hub & Spoke. This simple, secure and reliable high bandwidth service has enabled Nomura to connect its Local Area Networks (LANs) together, via Ethernet, the most widely used LAN technology, and seamlessly onward link to its global Wide Area Network (WAN) and thereby run its various sites as ‘one office.’ This will both reduce Nomura’s IT costs and increase its efficiency. It has also enabled Nomura to deliver new services via the network, including IP video conferencing, which has led to improved performance, assisted business globalisation and achieved significant revenue savings.

COLT is also providing Corporate Voice, a pan-European service which allows Nomura International to consolidate all of its voice expenditure under a single pricing structure and contract, thereby reducing its costs significantly.

Tim Wort, managing director for COLT in the UK, commented: “Nomura International’s decision to appoint COLT as its preferred network partner across Europe adds further endorsement to our position as a partner of choice for businesses with pan-European requirements. Leading financial institutions, such as Nomura, require increasingly high bandwidth and resilient networks to underpin their business. With our heritage in the financial sector and European footprint, COLT is committed to supporting the evolving requirements of the sector.”

In a separate release:

LONDON -- COLT, a leading European provider of business communications, today announced it has been awarded a major new contract, worth more than €15 million in revenues over five years, by Commerzbank AG, one of Germany’s largest banks. The agreement, one of the largest in COLT’s 13-year history, will see COLT manage and upgrade a major part of Commerzbank’s national and European communications infrastructure delivering higher speed communications at lower costs.

Jean-Yves Charlier, Chief Executive Officer at COLT, said, “We welcome the strengthening of our relationship with Commerzbank as a strong indicator of our leadership position in providing communications services to the Financial sector across Europe.”

COLT, Germany’s second largest alternative fixed line operator, will manage the communications network for approximately 190 Commerzbank sites across Germany and set up and manage a significant part of Commerzbank's national wide area network (WAN) backbone – 11 sites throughout the country. Rollout is scheduled for completion in late 2006. COLT will also continue to operate the majority of the Commerzbank European network. The bank’s offices in Dublin, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Milan and Frankfurt will all be supported by COLT’s owned and operated 20,000km European network.

COLT was selected over other suppliers because of the reach and quality of its fibre network which supports, either directly or through partners, more than 50,000 businesses across Europe. COLT will connect Commerzbank’s 11 backbone sites across Germany with redundant 155 Mbit/s lines based on proven SDH technology. Furthermore, Commerzbank’s 190 branch offices are interconnected via COLT’s ATM network using secure VPN services.

For individual branches Commerzbank opted for a multi-vendor approach and selected three different communications providers. Roland Schneider, Network Services Manager at Commerzbank, explains: “We took deliberate advantage of the competition between providers. Our positive experience with COLT in the past meant that we chose COLT in all areas where our branches could be connected up to its own network. COLT responded to our requirements with the utmost flexibility. We were very impressed by both this responsiveness and the cost-efficiency offered by COLT.”

Wolfgang Essig, Managing Director, Germany at COLT added: “Commerzbank is one of our key clients and has benefited from our services since 1996. I am therefore delighted at this major new order and consolidation of our long-term relationship.”

Colt Telecom Group plc