CenturyLink acquired AppFog, officially entered PaaS

According to CenturyLink insiders, CenturyLink is now in the process of taking over AppFog, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company, but the amount and terms of the deal are not yet disclosed.

CenturyLink used to be known for its phone and internet services and became the third-largest telecom operator in the United States after AT & T and Verizon after it acquired Qwest Communications from the U.S. telecommunications company. CenturyLink later acquired Ivis (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud services company Savvis, and to enter the cloud computing market.

AppFog is a PaaS platform, similar to Google APP Engine and Heroku. Its underlying foundations are popular IaaS platforms such as AWS, HP OpenStack, MS Azure and RackSpace, and middleware uses Cloud Foundry, VMWare's public cloud service. The predecessor of AppFog is PHPFog, changed to the present name after receiving a financing of 8 million dollars in 2011. Last August, AppFog acquired Node.js platform Nodester. Since then its center has gradually shifted to private PaaS.

The acquired AppFog will be part of Savvis. This acquisition is of great significance to CenturyLink and telecom operators. Although telecom operators attach great importance to cloud computing and many have their own cloud computing strategy and cloud computing companies, PaaS in the midst of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud computing systems has been the operator Short board. This acquisition will undoubtedly make CenturyLink's cloud strategy more complete.

However, it remains to be seen whether the relatively small size and impact of AppFog can give CenturyLink a competitive advantage. But for telecom operators, implementing PaaS through acquisitions is almost the only viable road.