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CenturyLink is usually a fascinating case study in reinvention. Formerly you’d have already been forgiven for lumping the organization in with all 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 more than that time has moved by means of a number of distinctive paradigms from the telecommunications business.

The latest paradigm, and a single which CenturyLink Login appears to be adapting to with aplomb, is the broader trend towards cloud computing. As classic voice solutions promptly develop into replaced by reduced price (and therefore, lower margin) IP telephony, CenturyLink has looked far and wide to bolster its business by embracing the cloud. A variety of clever acquisitions (cloud infrastructure provider Savvis, PaaS vendor AppFog and cloud heavyweight Tier3 for instance) has observed it turn into a real force within this latest incarnation of ICT.

Right now the developments maintain coming with news that CenturyLink is launching a worldwide private cloud supplying. Provided across 57 person data centers, every single instance inside the private cloud offering is federated into the CenturyLink network of public cloud nodes, therefore giving a single interface for both public and private cloud infrastructure. The private cloud offering sits on an identical platform to the public cloud one particular, enabling for seamless interplay among sources.

It is interesting to look at this news in context of where CenturyLink is as a vendor. They’ve a sizable existing colocation small business but, as Rackspace has discovered over the years, parlaying that into a public cloud small business is very tough. Colocation and public cloud seemingly have no connection within the minds of enterprise IT. What are connected having said that can be a colocation to private cloud progression and also the value proposition of a consistent federated public/private cloud hybrid. As such, CenturyLink is providing what can very best be described as a gateway drug - by making It’s decision to move from standard old hosting to private cloud that substantially much easier, additionally they massively enhance the chances that those similar buyers will, in time, move to public cloud. It is actually a related model to that being delivered by VMware VMW -1.43% with its vCHS service. It is an intermediate step which makes total sense from a solution, marketing and advertising and positioning viewpoint.

Make no error, regardless of what your view is concerning the “end state” of cloud computing, the reality now is 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, maybe a lot more importantly, a case study for how threatened legacy firms can reinvent themselves to remain relevant.