Telecommunications company CenturyLink has acquired Tier 3, a provider of public cloud hosting services based in the Seattle area. Tier 3’s cloud hosting platform is immediately renamed as ‘CenturyLink Cloud’. In addition, Tier 3’s products, roadmap and vision are now the foundation of CenturyLink’s cloud strategy.
This acquisition builds on CenturyLink’s earlier AppFog acquisition and existing cloud solutions that are complemented by CenturyLink’s colocation, managed hosting services and network offerings. The CenturyLink Cloud is available today in nine data centers around the world. CenturyLink acquired Tier 3 for an undisclosed price.
The Tier 3 organization will anchor the new Seattle-based CenturyLink Cloud Development Center. Jared Wray, founder and chief technology officer for Tier 3, will now serve as chief technology officer (CTO) for the CenturyLink Cloud organization and lead the CenturyLink Cloud Development Center.
Enterprise workloads
The new CenturyLink Cloud – based on Tier 3’s public, multi-tenant cloud – targets complex enterprise workloads and would be user-friendly for businesses of all sizes. With the product’s self-service interface, administrators 
are enabled to quickly create and manage highly available public cloud environments. A web services API and Cloud Foundry-based Platform-as-a-Service provide a comprehensive cloud application toolkit for enterprise developers.
“We founded Tier 3 in 2006 with a vision for cloud services that make life easier for enterprise developers and IT alike,” Wray said. “We now have an amazing home at CenturyLink to carry this vision forward. Our platform roadmap will combine with CenturyLink’s global network and data center footprint and managed services team to help change the face of enterprise computing.”
CenturyLink also owns Savvis, a global provider of cloud hosting, colocation and managed hosting services over advanced networks. Earlier this week, Savvis announced to expand its colocation presence in Canada with the summer 2014 launch of a new data center in the Toronto region. The 100,000-square-foot TR3 data center will support up to five megawatts of IT load.
