CenturyLink introduced a cloud application “orchestration” platform for enterprise-scale businesses yesterday. The CenturyLink Cloud Application Manager is designed to simplify deployment of workloads, managed services, and third-party cloud resources across private and public cloud environments and co-location centers, the carrier summarizes in a news release.
In addition to streamlining and reducing total life-cycle cloud application/services development and operating costs, the new platform enables customers to reallocate valuable in-house IT resources in ways that further enhance overall business operations, according to CenturyLink.
Customers can deploy, customize and manage CenturyLink Cloud Application Manager for themselves, or they can automate the deployment of managed services from CenturyLink for application and infrastructure management.
CenturyLink Cloud Application Manager
CenturyLink highlights the multi-application cloud management platform’s key features and functions in the press release:
- Application lifecycle management – Customers and partners can manage applications from build phase through deployment and run-state. Once deployed, customer-defined automation policies enable customers to scale, update, and migrate applications across environments.
- Managed services anywhere – Customers and partners can select CenturyLink Managed Services for on-demand monitoring, patching, backup and remote administration across any hybrid hosting environment.
- Cloud optimization – Customers and partners can leverage existing public cloud accounts or provision new subscriptions directly through the Cloud Application Manager platform – simplifying vendor management and consolidating billing of multi-cloud deployments. Additionally, Cloud Application Manager enables customers to better manage costs and spending on the various cloud platforms while making recommendations on the ideal place to run workloads.
“Many of our customers and partners struggle with the business challenge of determining the best execution venue for their business applications,” explained CenturyLink’s VP of Hybrid IT product management David Shacochis in the press release. “We designed Cloud Application Manager to give our customers a wide variety of infrastructure options across diverse public and private cloud environments.
“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 roots of CenturyLink Application Manager lie in the company’s June 2016 acquisition of ElasticBox, management points out. “New resources and innovations from CenturyLink are expected to improve and leverage the ElasticBox hybrid cloud application management platform to deliver end-to-end network, multi-cloud and hybrid IT managed services,” management commented at the time.
CenturyLink’s proposed acquisition of Level 3 Communications may add another level of synergy to its enterprise cloud-focused technological and business strategy.
An estimated three-quarters (76%) of the combined company’s annual revenues would flow from the enterprise and wholesale telecom/computing market. That would make the combined company the most heavily enterprise business-focused of the nation’s top five telecom/cloud services providers, Level 3 CFO Sunit Patel said during an industry conference last November.
