CenturyLink Offers Worldwide Private Cloud Service
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CenturyLink can be a fascinating case study in reinvention. Formerly you’d have already been forgiven for lumping the organization in with each of the other telco dinosaurs - major, old, slow and destined to a painful demise. CenturyLink CTL +1.15% features a corporate history that spans close to a century and over that time has moved through a number of diverse paradigms from the telecommunications market.
The latest paradigm, and 1 which CenturyLink Login seems to be adapting to with aplomb, could be the broader trend towards cloud computing. As conventional voice solutions rapidly grow to be replaced by reduce expense (and hence, decrease margin) IP telephony, CenturyLink has looked far and wide to bolster its business enterprise by embracing the cloud. A variety of intelligent acquisitions (cloud infrastructure provider Savvis, PaaS vendor AppFog and cloud heavyweight Tier3 for example) has noticed it develop into a genuine force within this newest incarnation of ICT.
Nowadays the developments hold coming with news that CenturyLink is launching a worldwide private cloud supplying. Provided across 57 person data centers, each and every instance inside the private cloud providing is federated into the CenturyLink network of public cloud nodes, therefore providing a single interface for each public and private cloud infrastructure. The private cloud providing sits on an identical platform for the public cloud one particular, permitting for seamless interplay between sources.
It's fascinating to look at this news in context of where CenturyLink is as a vendor. They've a sizable current colocation small business but, as Rackspace has learned over the years, parlaying that into a public cloud enterprise is very challenging. Colocation and public cloud seemingly have no connection inside the minds of enterprise IT. What are connected however is often a colocation to private cloud progression and the worth proposition of a constant federated public/private cloud hybrid. As such, CenturyLink is delivering what can finest be described as a gateway drug - by producing It’s decision to move from regular old hosting to private cloud that substantially simpler, they also massively raise the chances that these exact same consumers will, in time, move to public cloud. It is actually a similar model to that being delivered by VMware VMW -1.43% with its vCHS service. It’s an intermediate step which makes total sense from a solution, advertising and positioning point of view.
Make no mistake, irrespective of what your view is regarding the “end state” of cloud computing, the reality today is the fact that organizations, for one of the most component, demand a hybrid supplying. This announcement is each a logical step for an enterprise-focused vendor like CenturyLink Login but, possibly much more importantly, a case study for how threatened legacy enterprises can reinvent themselves to stay relevant.
