CenturyLink opens third cloud and managed services development center in St. Louis

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) has opened a new development center in St. Louis, a facility where it will locate teams focused on automating and developing managed services for business customers.

The service provider previously opened a Seattle-area Cloud Development Center, in October 2014, and its Monroe, La.-based Technology Center of Excellence, in March 2015.

Each of these centers build off of various acquisitions CenturyLink has made in recent years of cloud-focused providers like Appfog, Tier 3 and Orchestrate, a managed database provider.

CenturyLink said that over 230 employees will eventually work at the new 46,000-square-foot facility, which features a design centered on collaborative development.

"We are using this facility to focus on our managed services product development," said Pasha Mohammed, VP of product development of CenturyLink, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "The workspaces are conducive to an agile environment where the teams are working collaboratively on end-to-end development, management and testing functionality within that same organization."

Inside the center, it will equip 19 team workspaces with mobile and adjustable-height tables, a sofa and lounge chairs, smartboards and other features.

Other collaboration spaces in the center include an executive briefing room, large areas for hosting developer and start-up events, and a dining area.

St. Louis is a key spot as it was the origin of Savvis which CenturyLink acquired in 2011 and is the third center it has opened to date.

"CenturyLink acquired Savvis, which had a significant amount of presence of development and operations within St. Louis area and we're continuing that tradition," Mohammed said. "We noticed that there's a gravity that was happening around these resources specialized in the cloud and data center environments and agile product development methodologies so we thought we should take advantage of that fact with a development center there."

For more:
- see the release

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