CenturyLink opens Cloud Development Center in Seattle

CenturyLink, Inc. has announced the opening of the CenturyLink Cloud Development Center, the company’s new Seattle-area home for cloud platform development and innovation. The new facility serves as another cloud milestone for the company since the establishment of CenturyLink Cloud nearly a year ago.

“The Cloud Development Center ushers in a new era for CenturyLink, offering a collaborative environment for top technology talent from around the world, a hub for client and industry discussions, and a focal point for building technology solutions that benefit our customers,” said Jared Wray, chief technology officer for CenturyLink Cloud and head of the new center. “Our new facility builds on our legacy roots in the Seattle area, where we founded CenturyLink Cloud, and is designed to foster creativity among the top developers and coders of today and tomorrow as they keep CenturyLink at the forefront of cloud and platform innovation.”

The opening of the Cloud Development Center creates opportunities for customers, partners and industry influencers to discover CenturyLink Cloud innovations. The Seattle area was selected as the location for the facility due to the concentration of cloud companies and resources in the market.

About 300 employees will ultimately work at the 30,000-square-foot center, which is located in Bellevue, Seattle’s largest suburb. The center includes an executive briefing center and an innovative design centered on collaborative development, featuring “team room” workspaces and a large area for hosting developer and start-up events.

“CenturyLink’s new Cloud Development Center strengthens the Seattle region, which many consider the capital of cloud computing. The center creates exciting career opportunities for developers to make their mark and contribute to the flourishing technology community here in Bellevue,” said Washington Rep. Cyrus Habib, who represents Bellevue, Kirkland, Redmond, Medina and Clyde Hill. “We’re very happy to have CenturyLink invest in our area, and we look forward to watching the company grow its cloud and managed hosting capabilities.”

CenturyLink has made several significant cloud advancements since its acquisition of Tier 3 in November 2013:
· Launching globally available Private Cloud service in 57 data centers
· Adding several new public cloud nodes, bringing the total number of worldwide locations to 12
· Contributing Panamax, a Docker management platform, to the open-source community
· Introducing self-service, on-demand managed services through the CenturyLink Cloud platform
· Announcing new cloud pricing
· Earning industry recognition as a leading cloud provider
· Launching Hyperscale high-performance server instances designed for web-scale workloads, big data and cloud-native applications
· Building on its commitment to Pivotal and Cloud Foundry open-source project by joining the Cloud Foundry foundation

“Our first year as CenturyLink Cloud has been remarkable,” Wray added. “The Cloud Development Center furthers our commitment to the Seattle region and our ongoing cloud initiatives. Our team has an unwavering focus to provide innovative and reliable IT services and infrastructure to our worldwide customers.”

The Cloud Development Center in the Seattle area and the planned opening of a Technology Center of Excellence in Monroe, La., are reflective of CenturyLink’s ongoing reinvention as a global leader in the IP-enabled network services, cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions markets.