Cloud Market Integration: CenturyLink Acquisition IaaS manufacturer Tier 3

US telecoms giant CenturyLink another takeover in the cloud computing market. This time it was the acquisition of innovative public IaaS (infrastructure services) provider Tier 3. The acquisition will add new products to the company's cloud computing product base, showing the dynamic nature of the enterprise's position in the market.

CenturyLink's cloud platform has been built on the Savvis platform. That was another IaaS provider that CenturyLink bought in 2011 with 2.5 billion dollars. Earlier this year, CenturyLink also acquired PAAs (platform service) manufacturer Appfog. The acquisition of Tier 3 makes it clear that CenturyLink not only hosts virtual machines and storage, but also becomes an application development platform.

The deal also represents the latest consolidation in the market: IBM acquired SoftLayer early this year. Verizon has bought Terremark in the past two years. Other companies, such as Rackspace, have acquired many start-ups.

Tier 3 is a small IaaS cloud provider that also provides PAAs services based on cloud Foundry open source software projects. The more pure PAAs provider Appfog is also based on cloud Foundry. The combined IaaS platform of these two companies has the potential to be perfectly integrated.

Tier 3 's products have some innovative features that make it eye-catching in the crowded cloud services market. Tier 3 has the ability to automatically upgrade virtual machines without shutting down, and has the option to automatically replicate virtual machine mirroring across the data center for backup, according to the Magic Quadrant, a market research firm Gartner's latest release of the IaaS market. Tier 3 is also a major supporter of Iron Foundry (Cloud Foundry's. net extension), which provides an enterprise-oriented application development framework for Windows applications for that company-integrated PAAs.

Gartner pointed out that Tier 3 encountered resistance, because compared with some industry giants, Tier 3 is too small to use marketing and beyond the scope of resources to attract users to their platform. However, the CenturyLink acquisition will help Tier 3 solve the problem.

Tier 3 founder and CTO Jared Wray will serve as chief technical Officer of the newly formed Cloud Development Center within CenturyLink. The terms of the deal are not disclosed. (Compiled/Populus euphratica)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)