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Tag: CenturyLink

  • CenturyLink launches ‘multi-cloud’ management strategy

    CenturyLink launches ‘multi-cloud’ management strategy

    CenturyLink has launched CenturyLink Cloud Application Manager, a new orchestration platform designed to simplify deployment of enterprise workloads, managed services, and third-party cloud resources.

    The tech firm said this cloud-agnostic management platform enables companies to better manage applications and workloads across hybrid hosting environments – in customer private clouds, colocation centers and public cloud environments.

    In a business climate where companies need to simplify management and governance of applications across multiple cloud infrastructures without sacrificing control or visibility, Cloud Application Manager delivers flexibility that enterprises need to quickly provision, deploy and migrate workloads to the environment that best matches business requirements, the company said.

    “Many of our customers and partners struggle with the business challenge of determining the best execution venue for their business applications. We designed Cloud Application Manager to give our customers a wide variety of infrastructure options across diverse public and private cloud environments,” David Shacochis, VP of hybrid IT product management at CenturyLink said.

    “Cloud Application Manager helps companies avoid vendor lock-in, automate application deployments, scale workloads across disparate hosting environments, and optimize their costs over time. These benefits are available in a self-service model, or one that is actively managed by CenturyLink team members,” the executive said.

    Users can consume Cloud Application Manager via the cloud version (SaaS) or the data center version (a virtual appliance that runs on-premises in their data center). This usage-based platform allows customers to consume the value-added services they need with a consolidated bill and a simplified, yet powerful, interface, the company further said.

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  • CenturyLink launches ‘integrated big data’ for global firms

    CenturyLink launches ‘integrated big data’ for global firms

    CenturyLink has launched CenturyLink Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) with Managed Cloudera, a new managed service offering.

    The company said the new offering combines CenturyLink’s expertise in data and advanced analytics, network, cloud and application services with the highly secure Apache Hadoop-based data management and analytics platform from Cloudera.

    This managed service delivers data integration and analytics consulting to help customers deliver use cases for increasing sales, streamlining operations, improving customer engagement and gaining competitive advantage.

    Many organizations lack the in-house resources, expertise and strategy needed to successfully leverage their big data, especially as the Internet of Things (IoT) places more demands on their IT infrastructure.

    CenturyLink BDaaS, led by specialized consulting from the company’s team of big data experts, delivers a comprehensive managed service backed by infrastructure that can handle data-intensive workloads, including surges. This enables rapid analysis of large and complex data sets, the company said.

    CenturyLink BDaaS is enhanced by adding data and advanced analytics consulting services supported by a deep bench of Cloudera-certified data scientists and Cloudera Hadoop solution administrators, developers and architects. The solution, bolstered by CenturyLink’s global high-speed network connectivity, provides storage, processing, and management components deployed on CenturyLink Cloud Bare Metal servers.

    As a preferred Cloudera partner, this new BDaaS solution on Cloudera Enterprise furthers CenturyLink’s commitment to its recently expanded strategic alliance with Cloudera.

  • CenturyLink to sell data centers for $2.15b

    CenturyLink to sell data centers for $2.15b

    US-based global operator CenturyLink has arranged to sell its data centers and colocation business to a consortium led by BC Partners and Medina for $2.15 billion.

    CenturyLink plans to use the net proceeds from this sale to partly fund its acquisition of Level 3 Communications announced last week

    Under terms of the agreement, the consortium will assume ownership of CenturyLink’s portfolio of 57 data centers at closing. The data center portfolio includes approximately 195 megawatts of power across 2.6 million square feet of raised floor capacity.

    Post-sale, the company will continue to focus on offering customers a wide range of IT services and solutions, including network, managed hosting and cloud.

    Though it will no longer own the data centers, CenturyLink will continue to offer colocation services as part of its product portfolio through its commercial relationships to be entered into at closing with the BC Partners/Medina-led consortium.

    “After conducting a thorough review process, we are pleased to have reached an agreement with BC Partners,”  CenturyLink CEO Glen F. Post III said.

    “We believe this transaction will benefit customers, employees and investors. Both CenturyLink and BC Partners have a strong customer focus and are committed to ensuring a seamless transition of the customers and their colocation environments.”

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  • Cloudera, CenturyLink offer Big Data as a Service

    Cloudera, CenturyLink offer Big Data as a Service

    Cloudera has expanded its partnership with CenturyLink to deliver big data as a service to enable customers gain value from all their data.

    As part of being a preferred partner, CenturyLink’s Global IT Services is delivering a fully managed big data solution powered by Cloudera Enterprise.

    This combined big data offering will exponentially speed time to deploy Cloudera Enterprise and also simplify some of the management complexities from Hadoop operations, so that customers can spend more time working with data and generating new insights that drive business growth.

    “In addition to offering a platform for big data management and analytics in the cloud, we are also focused on delivering value-added use cases that run on this platform and help our customers become more agile and responsive,” said Gary Gauba, president of CenturyLink Cognilytics.

    By leveraging Cloudera Enterprise, CenturyLink will gain a more complete view of its customers across all its systems, products, and diverse interaction channels. This entails integrating all existing data sources and ingesting real-time data.

    CenturyLink will use the Cloudera platform to perform advanced analytics in the areas of SDN as well as network virtualization to proactively monitor and further optimize its global communications network.

    Tom Reilly, CEO of Cloudera, said CenturyLink’s big data-as-a-service offerings will make concepts like advanced analytics, machine learning, and real-time data more available and accessible to more people.

    CenturyLink’s big data-as-a-service solutions are under development and expected to be generally available later this year. Cloudera managed services by CenturyLink are now generally available.

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  • CenturyLink acquires cloud startup ElasticBox

    CenturyLink acquires cloud startup ElasticBox

    CenturyLink has announced the acquisition of ElasticBox, a multi-cloud application management service for an undisclosed amount.

    The acquisition combines the ElasticBox platform with the global network, hosting and delivery capabilities of CenturyLink.

    ElasticBox, a startup with offices in San Francisco and Madrid, enables enterprise IT organizations to orchestrate the deployment of applications and create a self-service catalog of applications and infrastructure.

    Aamir Hussain, CenturyLink CTO said the acquisition of ElasticBox strengthens and enhances CenturyLink’s development and deployment of multi-cloud services management capabilities, as well as the company’s ability to deliver end-to-end network and hybrid IT services to business customers globally.

    “The ElasticBox multi-cloud management platform frees businesses to focus on issues that are central to their organization rather than spending time and resources managing multiple clouds,” Hussain noted.

    ElasticBox enables application orchestration for more than 12 different cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, IBM’s SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and VMware. ElasticBox recently added support for CenturyLink Cloud and more feature support for Google Compute Engine and OpenStack. ElasticBox also supports Docker and Amazon ECS containers, and recently added Kubernetes as another destination for applications. These deployment options enable customers to package a range of applications into a container and manage it via ElasticBox.

    CenturyLink and Nxtra Data Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, meanwhile announced an exclusive business partnership to provide advanced hosting and managed IT services to enterprises in India.

    This exclusive partnership brings Nxtra Data’s Indiadata center management expertise together with CenturyLink’s cost-effective hosting, managed services and cloud capabilities to serve businesses and government organizations in India.

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  • AWS still dominates cloud infrastructure market

    AWS still dominates cloud infrastructure market

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to dominate the cloud infrastructure services market with a 31% worldwide market share, dwarfing the chasing pack, according to new Q1 data from Synergy Research Group.

    The big three followers – Microsoft, IBM and Google – in aggregate accounted for 22% of the market, while the next 20 top-ranked cloud providers accounted for another 27%. The good news for Microsoft and Google is that they both achieved growth rates of well over 100% so they are at least slowly gaining some ground on the market leader.

    Outside of the big four, the next 20 cloud providers are growing at an average 41% per year, but in a market that is growing at over 50% that means that most of them are losing market share.

    The next 20 providers include Alibaba, CenturyLink, Fujitsu, HPE, NTT, Oracle, Orange, Rackspace, Salesforce, and Vmware.

    With most of the major operators having now released their earnings data for Q1, Synergy estimates that quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues (including IaaS, PaaS and private & hybrid cloud) have now comfortably passed the $7 billion milestone.

    Growth rates remain somewhat similar across the major regions meaning that the United States continues to account for around half of the worldwide market.

    “This is a market that is so big and is growing so rapidly that companies can be growing by 10-30% per year and might feel good about themselves and yet they’d still be losing market share,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst and Research Director at Synergy Research Group.

    “The big question for them is whether or not they are building a sustainable and profitable business. This can be done by focusing on specific regions or specific services, but the bulk of the market demands huge scale, a broad footprint, very deep pockets and a long-term corporate focus.”

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  • CenturyLink expands cloud platform to Australia

    CenturyLink expands cloud platform to Australia

    CenturyLink has announced the availability of CenturyLink Cloud in Australia.

    The CenturyLink Cloud platform delivers enterprise-class control, agility, scalability and security backed by an industry-leading global network.

    Businesses based or operating in Australia can now turn to a single, trusted provider for public and private cloud infrastructure, managed services, colocation, network connectivity and support for advanced hybrid solutions.

    The Sydney cloud node joins the company’s other available cloud locations in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, and Singapore.

    Gery Messer, CenturyLink managing director, Asia Pacific, said “Launching the CenturyLink Cloud node in Australia signals our strong commitment to this key growth market.

    “We’re seeing increased customer demand for IT services in Australia, which is one of the most connected countries in the world. Thanks to our continued investment in Asia Pacific, many more organizations are achieving success on their hybrid IT journeys,” the executive said.

    Business research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan predicts cloud spending in Asia Pacific will reach $20 billion in 2018.

    CenturyLink’s presence in Asia-Pacific dates back to 1999. Numerous regional and multinational corporations in Australia are customers.

    The Australia cloud node is one of several recent cloud advancements for CenturyLink. In early March, the CenturyLink Development Center opened in St. Louis with a focus on building cloud-based managed services that help drive increased value for businesses. In January, the company launched Relational Database (DB) Service, a MySQL-compatible database-as-a-service designed to meet application developers’ rapid software requirements and drive more agile IT.

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