CenturyLink Delivers International Private Cloud Service
De BISAWiki
CenturyLink is often a fascinating case study in reinvention. Formerly you’d happen to be forgiven for lumping the firm in with all the other telco dinosaurs - huge, old, slow and destined to a painful demise. CenturyLink CTL +1.15% includes a corporate history that spans close to a century and over that time has moved by means of numerous various paradigms of your telecommunications sector.
The most recent paradigm, and one which CenturyLink Login appears to be adapting to with aplomb, is the broader trend towards cloud computing. As regular voice services swiftly develop into replaced by reduce expense (and hence, decrease margin) IP telephony, CenturyLink has looked far and wide to bolster its enterprise by embracing the cloud. A number of wise acquisitions (cloud infrastructure provider Savvis, PaaS vendor AppFog and cloud heavyweight Tier3 by way of example) has seen it become a real force within this newest incarnation of ICT.
Nowadays the developments maintain coming with news that CenturyLink is launching a worldwide private cloud providing. Supplied across 57 individual data centers, every single instance inside the private cloud supplying is federated in to the CenturyLink network of public cloud nodes, as a result giving a single interface for each public and private cloud infrastructure. The private cloud supplying sits on an identical platform to the public cloud one particular, permitting for seamless interplay involving resources.
It is actually exciting to appear at this news in context of where CenturyLink is as a vendor. They have a large current colocation business but, as Rackspace has discovered more than the years, parlaying that into a public cloud small business is quite tough. Colocation and public cloud seemingly have no connection within the minds of enterprise IT. What are connected even so is actually a colocation to private cloud progression and also the worth proposition of a constant federated public/private cloud hybrid. As such, CenturyLink is delivering what can most effective be described as a gateway drug - by creating It’s decision to move from standard old hosting to private cloud that a lot simpler, they also massively improve the possibilities that those identical clients will, in time, move to public cloud. It really is a comparable model to that getting delivered by VMware VMW -1.43% with its vCHS service. It’s an intermediate step which makes total sense from a product, advertising and positioning perspective.
Make no mistake, no matter what your view is regarding the “end state” of cloud computing, the reality today is the fact that organizations, for one of the most part, demand a hybrid providing. This announcement is both a logical step for an enterprise-focused vendor like CenturyLink Login but, maybe much more importantly, a case study for how threatened legacy companies can reinvent themselves to remain relevant.
