Jonathan King, CenturyLink's (NYSE: CTL) former cloud leader, has begun a new life at Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC) where he will lead the Swedish vendor's cloud product strategy and acquisitions team.
He will reunite with colleague Jason Hoffman, the founder and former CTO of Joyent. Hoffman joined Ericsson as vice president of corporate strategy in 2013.
His arrival at Ericsson comes at a time when CenturyLink has decided to realign its cloud services leadership and strategy.
King, who was a seminal figure in CenturyLink's cloud strategy, left the telco earlier this week. Jared Wray, senior vice president of platform and application framework development for CenturyLink's cloud division, also departed from the company.
Similar to his role at CenturyLink, King will oversee product strategy, business development and mergers and acquisitions at Ericsson.
King led CenturyLink's acquisition of Savvis in 2011, which gave it an instant foothold in the cloud services industry, He also helped the company in acquiring other cloud-based companies, including Appfog, Tier 3 and Orchestrate, a cloud-based managed database provider.
As more businesses put their cloud services into the hands of third-party providers like Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Ericsson has been making a number of key additions to its cloud portfolio, including a recent investment in Apcera, which provides a cloud development platform for businesses, and a strategic agreement with Cisco.
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