CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is offering its new and existing business customers a new way to consume managed services by introducing an on-demand option on its cloud platform.
Offering pay-by-the-hour billing, businesses can select how they want to consume managed services such as web servers, middleware, directory services and database applications, along with operating systems.
This new service option builds on the combination of the assets it purchased from AppFog and Tier 3, which were later merged with Savvis to form the CenturyLink Technology Solutions business unit.
"We are taking the long heritage of Savvis, now CenturyLink Technology Services with hundreds of engineers and asking how do we use the acquisition of Tier 3 and marry the best of both," said Richard Seroter, director of Product Management, Cloud for CenturyLink Technology Solutions, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "What we're seeing are customers that like the flexibility and agility of cloud and others like the predictability of managed services."
Because these managed services are available on the CenturyLink Cloud platform, they will create what the telco says is "a single self-service user experience."
A key element of this service is about providing automated capabilities to give customers access to the capabilities they need.
"When a cloud comes in and provisions a virtual server, they have an option to toggle the server as managed and when that happens we use our automation technology and our APIs to configure a managed service without any manual intervention," Seroter said. "From our control portal, people who are regular cloud users have the option to do managed services."
When the service is launched, CenturyLink said it will offer eight services: Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux managed operating systems, as well as managed applications Active Directory, Apache HTTP Server, Apache Tomcat, Microsoft Internet Information Services, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL.
Over time it will integrate its entire managed hosting services into the cloud platform.
Beginning on June 30, these cloud-based managed services will be available initially through CenturyLink Cloud nodes in Santa Clara, Calif., and Sterling, Va., with additional managed services and global locations in Europe and Asia enabled later this year.
For more:
- see the release
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