Peak 10, Level 3 Form Ethernet Team in the Cloud

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By Edward Gately

Customers of IT infrastructure provider Peak 10 now will have access to a secure, dedicated and direct Ethernet connection to the cloud through a new partnership with Level 3 Communications.

This week, Peak 10 announced it has teamed with Level 3 to introduce Cloud Connect Solutions – Ethernet to its customers. It provides a private, scalable Ethernet connection into the Peak 10 cloud, replaces a more cumbersome pricing model with flat-rate pricing, and scales bandwidth on-demand to support changing business needs.

The new service could make it faster and easier for companies that have been hardware-based and managing their own environments to move into the cloud for strategic purposes, said Monty Blight, Peak 10’s vice president of sales operations and product strategy.

This is the latest offering from Peak 10’s partnership with Level 3, which bought tw telecom last year.

“There are some competitive services that they offer, but we are typically targeting a different kind of customer,” Blight told Channel Partners. “This is their new product that we see significant value in. So they got with us awhile back and asked how we could utilize this together, and received a lot of input from us on how to develop it.”

By utilizing Cloud Connect Solutions – Ethernet circuits, Peak 10 further extends its reach beyond the walls of the data center to its customers’ doorsteps. Now Peak 10 customers can achieve a direct Ethernet connection to and through the data center into the cloud, creating a faster and simpler network experience, he said.

The new service includes shared public cloud, single tenant private cloud and disaster recovery, “so we’re talking about hundreds of customers for whom this might make sense,” Blight said.

In addition to Cloud Connect Solutions – Ethernet, Peak 10 cloud and data center customers also have access to a variety of other networking services.

“As users continue to accelerate their adoption of cloud services, [the new service] delivers the resilient, secure and predictable network connections they need,” said Brian Hoekelman, Level 3’s vice president of business and cloud ecosystem development. “The result is a seamlessly managed connection for the customer so they can focus on improving their business performance.”