Communications in the Cloud

With its recent acquisition of Level 3 Communications, CenturyLink is around a $24 billion communications and managed-services powerhouse, with approximately 450,000 miles of fiber — and customers in more than 60 countries worldwide. However, many enterprises may still think of them as ‘just’ a telecom company. Given CenturyLink was an initial VMware Cloud Verified partner, there is clearly much more. We spoke with Michael Joffe, Senior Director of Product Management at CenturyLink, about the relevance of this VMware designation.

“Over the past decade, we’ve been making strategic acquisitions to bring together a powerful portfolio of managed services offerings. One of the most exciting recent additions to that portfolio is the CenturyLink private cloud built on top of VMware Cloud Foundation™,” says Joffe. “With our acquisition of Level 3 Communications that closed last November, we’re the second largest U.S. communications provider to global enterprise customers, and now we can take that backbone and layer any infrastructure components on top, creating a bridge from on-premises to hybrid cloud for businesses of all sizes,” says Joffe.

CenturyLink has provided VMware network services for years, including providing the network for the popular VMworld® conferences.

What does Joffe see as the key benefits of bringing VMware and CenturyLink together? Years of synergy. “We leverage best of breed, and we’ve standardized on VMware at CenturyLink. Offering a single source approach, we can offer users on-premises, in datacenter or with co-location.  We can manage their entire VMware environment for them, or just those pieces they want to get off their plate,” says Joffe.

“If you’re an enterprise company looking for resiliency between your offices and the data center, we can deploy different networking products to deliver the best experience and lowest latency. Since we own the network, there are cost benefits in sourcing multiple products/services from us,” he adds.

We asked Joffe what about CenturyLink would surprise IT decision makers. “I’d say it’s not just the major services, but all the accoutrements we have to go along with them,” says Joffe. “The multi-cloud aspect of our offering, which allows us to manage your clouds in VMware, Azure, AWS, gives true flexibility in moving workloads from private to public clouds, and it’s still surprising to many users. But when you consider the long history between CenturyLink and VMware, and combine that with the power of our network, we really have a unique set of capabilities that we can offer companies around the globe.”

Read more about VMware and CenturyLink.