CenturyLink expands VMware collaboration, sets greater focus on business hybrid cloud adoption

CenturyLink has expanded its strategic collaboration with VMware as a way to assist enterprise customers in their transition to a hybrid cloud architecture.

The service provider will work with VMware to deepen the level of software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies available to enterprise customers. This collaboration will help preserve and enhance customer investments in on-premises data centers and extend strategic workloads and applications to the cloud.

Additionally, customers will be able to leverage VMware's technologies with CenturyLink's portfolio of network, managed hosting and cloud solutions.

"More companies are looking for service provider expertise in managing public and private cloud solutions in various hybrid IT models," said Bill Corbin, senior vice president of strategic partner alliances and channel operations for CenturyLink, in a release. "The expansion of our long-standing relationship with VMware benefits our customers through further enhancements to our cloud portfolio with deeper integration of VMware technologies."

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CenturyLink and VMware have a long-standing relationship of developing cloud and managed services solutions for their business customers.

The service provider has included VMware vCloud Air as part of its multi-cloud offerings since its launch in 2013. Some of these services include CenturyLink Cloud and CenturyLink Dedicated Cloud Compute (DCC).

CenturyLink Cloud is one of the largest VMware vSphere-based multi-tenant cloud environments

As one of the largest vSphere-based private cloud service offerings, CenturyLink Dedicated Cloud Compute (DCC) enables modular scalability and architecture flexibility to customers seeking secure, auditable infrastructure as a service that can be tuned to enterprise workloads like SAP.

CenturyLink said the DCC service will soon include software-defined data center (SDDC) features based on VMware NSX, VMware vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation technologies.

Finally, CenturyLink's ElasticBox application management framework includes adaptors for VMware vCenter, vCloud Director and vCloud Air, which enables CenturyLink's customers to receive services anywhere they need them.

Cloud-based services continue to be a large part of CenturyLink’s business service portfolio

Although CenturyLink reported that fourth quarter business revenues declined 4.1% year-over-year to $2.55 billion due a decline in legacy revenues, it’s clear that next-gen business services like private clouds are having a growing effect on its business services mix.

The telco noted that losses were offset by 3% growth in high-bandwidth data revenues. Strategic revenues were $1.23 billion in the quarter, up 1.1% year-over-year from the fourth quarter of 2015.