CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is going educate more of the IT community about the emerging cloud services trends that are affecting IT departments inside businesses via a multi-city tour that will feature industry analysts and the telco's customers.
Through its Elevate events, CenturyLink's current and prospective customers will be able to hear about new IT trends such as big data, security and disaster recovery, customer-centric IT and cloud and DevOps.
Set to run through mid-July through October, the Elevate series will feature keynotes from a number of industry experts, including CIO Magazine contributing editor Julia King, "Cloudonomics" author Joe Weinman and CenturyLink executives Shirish Lal, David Shacochis, David Mahon and Gary Gauba.
Beginning with Boston, the Elevate series will be featured in 26 cities, a tour that will include a mix of domestic U.S. cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., and key international markets like London and Singapore.
Having this event operate in multiple domestic and international cities reflects CenturyLink's ongoing buildout of data centers and the growth of its managed and cloud services portfolio.
The company has been enhancing its data center and managed services business through a mix of organic internal developments and targeted acquisitions of other smaller providers that add complementary assets to its portfolio.
A big element underlying CenturyLink's managed service and cloud growth has been the ongoing buildout of data centers in the U.S. and internationally.
On the domestic side, the service provider has been building new data centers in key markets like Minneapolis and building a hydroelectric-powered facility in Washington state.
It is being no less aggressive on the international front. In addition to establishing a foothold in the Australian market, the service provider has expanded its data facilities and cloud offerings in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Tokyo. As it has extended service into more Asia-Pacific markets, the service provider has extended the availability of its Private Cloud service in all 58 of its global data centers.
At the same time, the company has been snapping up smaller operators to expand its cloud services portfolio, with the most acquisition being Orchestrate, a provider of managed database service capabilities. Prior to Orchestrate, CenturyLink bought DataGardens while enhancing its cloud application capabilities by acquiring Tier 3 and Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider AppFog.
Despite its efforts, the telco reported in the first quarter of 2015 that hosting services revenues were $318 million, down from $328 million in the same period a year ago.
For more:
- see the release
Related articles:
CenturyLink to bring 1 Gbps broadband to 700,000 homes by end of year
CenturyLink names Bobb as VP, global sales, for U.S. East region
AT&T, CenturyLink and other ISPs imagined concerns won't hinder broadband, Wheeler says