Nicklas has already moved from the US to London to take up his new position, where he will report to Colt’s CTO Rajiv Datta.
The company said this morning that Nicklas will be responsible for driving technology innovation across the next-generation Colt IQ Network as part of Colt’s €500 million, three-year investment plan.
Colt’s CEO Carl Grivner and Nicklas have worked together before. Nicklas was CTO at XO for the whole of Grivner’s spell as CEO from 2003 to 2011. “I’ve known of Colt for years. XO is very analogous to Colt in Europe,” Nicklas told Capacity in an interview this month.
The Colt IQ Network does not yet extend to the US, though it covers the company’s operations in Europe and its expanding Asian business. “IQ Net is all about delivering higher bandwidth services to enterprise and wholesale customers,” Nicklas told Capacity. “It’s not just Europe, it’s Singapore and Hong Kong and Japan. IQ Net in Asia and Europe is configured the same way and has the same set of systems.”
He admitted in the Capacity interview – which is in the August/September issue – that “IQ Net is not yet in the US”. Does that mean it will be? “I hope so,” he said, followed by a long pause. “Let me just stop there. There are some opportunities in North America and the US in particular. Stay tuned.”
The IQ Network will help Colt move into new markets, he said in the interview: “Colt helps cloud providers build their backbones. We are in the engine room to help provide these very large cloud networks.”
Datta welcomed Nicklas’s arrival. “Randy’s appointment will ensure that the Colt IQ Network is primed to help our customers make this critical shift, while maintaining an exceptional user experience,” he said. “His extensive experience will allow us to maintain a competitive advantage by bringing together our data centre networking scale and performance, impressive fibre footprint, and the agility of our award-winning services.”
