CenturyLink Unveils Private Cloud Product

CenturyLink Technology Solutions has launched a new private cloud service, offering to set up elastic private IT infrastructure for customers in any of its 57 data centers around the world.

Hybrid cloud, a setup where a company uses private cloud to host its mission critical applications and data in combination with public cloud resources for less sensitive data and applications or for capacity bursting, is widely viewed as the way forward for enterprises in adopting the cloud model for IT infrastructure.

That is the market CenturyLink is looking to capture. Its private cloud instances will be federated with its public cloud. Users will be able to manage infrastructure consisting of both through a single interface.

“It’s a private version of our public cloud offering, meaning it goes through the same 21-day cycle for new updates and features, is updated and managed using the same CenturyLink platform and can be put into any of our 57 data centers around the world,” a company spokesman wrote in an email.

The private cloud offering has a much wider geographic reach than the company’s public cloud, which is hosted in 11 locations.

CenturyLink has had a private cloud offering before, which came along with its acquisition of Savvis in 2011. Called Symphony Dedicated as part of Savvis’ product offerings, CenturyLink renamed it into Dedicated Cloud – a product that still exists and that the company still supports.

The company has been going after the enterprise cloud market with a vengeance ever since it acquired Savvis. It has addressed competition from the big public cloud players, such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, by slashing rates after the recent burst of “me-too” price cuts by the three giants.

It has also been competing with the mid-size players like itself – companies like Rackspace and IBM’s SoftLayer business – expanding its managed services portfolio.

Another big part of CenturyLink’s strategy in the cloud has been fostering talent and solutions that make developers’ work in the cloud easier. These capabilities received a major boost last year, when the company bought Platform-as-a-Service players AppFog and Tier 3.

Just last week, CenturyLink announced Panamax, a brainchild of AppFog founder Lucas Carlson, who is now its chief innovation officer. Panamax is a solution for deploying and managing applications that consist of multiple Docker containers in the cloud.