London, UK, XX September 2017 – Colt Technology Services today announced the appointment of Rajiv Datta as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the company, reporting directly to Chief Executive Officer Carl Grivner. In this new expanded role, Datta, who previously served as Colt’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), will now bring together Colt’s operational and technological capabilities, customer experience strategy, and award-winning product and innovation teams under one organisational framework.
“Rajiv has been instrumental in driving Colt’s high bandwidth connectivity focus and in delivering the capability to meet the growing demand for bandwidth across all business sectors,” said Grivner. “Customer engagement is at the heart of our strategic transformation, and Rajiv’s expanded role as COO naturally places all of our operational, technological & product tools in the service of driving customer experience excellence. This is about becoming more agile as a company in serving our customers while we we continue to invest significantly in our network and capability. I look forward to working with Rajiv and the rest of the leadership team in driving our transformation at an accelerated pace.”
Commented Datta, “The market is shifting rapidly towards higher bandwidth services as mega trends including enterprise cloud adoption and 5G small cell backhaul take hold; customers expect partners to demonstrate the same responsiveness and flexibility that is demanded of them. This new organisation will look to simplify our environment, re-tool processes and leverage innovation to drive the agility that our customers expect while continuing to deliver on our strategic transformation. I am privileged to be leading a strong team that is committed to making this happen and am excited to have the opportunity to play an expanded role at Colt.”
In his 18 months as CTO of Colt, Datta has been responsible for the development of Colt’s network technology strategy and the creation of Colt’s next generation of products and services, including the evolution of its SDN-based network. Datta has also been a key driver of Colt’s high bandwidth strategy, enabling this through the redesigning, simplifying and innovation of the Colt IQ Network, a fully integrated network delivering optical, Ethernet and IP services to 800+ key data centres and over 25,000 enterprise buildings. Prior to Colt, Datta held a number of senior positions in the telecoms and communications infrastructure industry, including that of Chief Operating Officer at AboveNet Communications.
