CenturyLink Adds IBM Cloud to Dynamic Connections Portfolio

IBM Cloud and CenturyLink have extended their partnership, first launched in 2018.

On Tuesday, the companies announced that IBM Cloud now features connectivity through CenturyLink’s agnostic Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections. This is the platform that allows businesses, or their channel partners, to do self-service and real-time provisioning for adding Ethernet to (or removing it from) cloud and data center environments through a portal or API integration. It also features usage-based billing, by the hour and month.

A little more than a year-and-a-half ago, Big Blue and CenturyLink teamed up to deliver dedicated and private network connectivity to the IBM Cloud through CenturyLink Cloud Connect solutions. Tuesday’s news serves as an extension of that alliance.

The addition of IBM Cloud to Dynamic Connections rounds out a veritable who’s-who list of public cloud vendors that channel partners may access and manage on behalf of their customers. That roster also includes Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Azure Government, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle and more than 2,200 data centers. CenturyLink offers the portfolio through North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Now, businesses may access the connections they need to link their workloads – think Salesforce, Office 365, Google Apps and so on – and sync up with data centers through CenturyLink and IBM’s Cloud Direct Link services (as well as the other, aforementioned providers).

CenturyLink said IBM Cloud, in particular, gives businesses advantages including:

Security acts as a core focus for all these capabilities. CenturyLink said that when it comes to enterprise cloud and data-center locations, Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections protects data to and from the hybrid cloud. The service achieves this by taking businesses off best-effort public networks and moving them to secure, private connections; this minimizes exposure to external threats.

On the whole, “extending Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections to IBM Cloud helps more businesses deploy hybrid cloud solutions and transform their network ecosystems as application and infrastructure requirements change,” said Paul Savill, senior vice president, enterprise product and services at CenturyLink.

IBM’s Gabriel Montanti

Gabriel Montanti, network product leader at IBM Cloud, agreed.

“We’re providing businesses the capabilities they need to accelerate their hybrid cloud strategies,” he said. “Through our Direct Link services, customers can take advantage of customizable offerings that allow them to move complex workloads, including mission-critical workloads, across hybrid cloud environments to IBM Cloud.”

In other words, Montanti noted, CenturyLink business customers now may “easily access IBM Cloud and modernize their offerings to stay ahead of the competition.”

Plus, as Savill pointed out, enterprises (or their channel partners) gain control over performance and cost through self-service tools that enable quick and easy changes to cloud connections.

To that point, yes, channel partners may provision the new IBM Cloud capabilities via Dynamic Connections to their customers.

CenturyLink’s Garrett Gee

“CenturyLink is focused on enabling our partners to help their customers connect data and workloads wherever they need them,” Garrett Gee, senior vice president of indirect sales at CenturyLink, told Channel Futures. “This includes combining cloud, network and technical expertise to connect, migrate, manage and modernize enterprise applications across a range of hybrid cloud environments.”

When deploying IBM Cloud services, partners may opt for CenturyLink’s help, too.

“We can assist partners with building a reference architecture, and both high-level and low-level designs for IBM Cloud networking,” Gee said.