IT people are doers, they make things happen. It’s just in their nature. So, when thought leaders talk about dramatic changes in technology affecting business and new digital business models, most IT people are already thinking, “What should we do about that?” They are ready for the business advantage that comes from a simpler, faster IT consumption process – one that also gives lines of businesses what they need at the speed they need it.

At CenturyLink, we are also doers. We are doing something tangible to support customers in the Gigabit economy. We are helping IT professionals bring about the digital transformation that everyone is talking about. We’re building a new platform for hybrid IT, a single point of control for virtually all IT assets and functions – a platform that enables IT managers to be agile. It’s called Platform CenturyLink.

Platform CenturyLink makes it possible to bring up environments and provide capabilities to end users, or to meet their needs very quickly, in different ways around different applications required by the business. Our goal with Platform CenturyLink is to place everything we offer to enterprise IT in a single management interface. The Platform gives IT efficient control over the network, public cloud assets, private cloud environments, legacy infrastructure, and applications – a single UI to order network services and spin up machines automatically – basically do all sorts of tasks that used to require help tickets, phone calls and manual processes.

The insight that led to Platform CenturyLink was a realization that Hybrid IT is a promising reality, not a burden. Yes, you are going to be running everything you’ve got and adding cloud capabilities to the mix. While there is a lot of cloud migration going on, the truth is that most serious businesses are going to be continuing with all sorts of legacy systems for the foreseeable future. There is an opportunity to make it all work well together. We want to make it efficient to deal with this challenge. For this reason, Platform CenturyLink will combine network, cloud, hosting, and Colocation management into a highly scalable, API-driven toolset. It enables agility by unifying of all of our infrastructure, software, and network assets.

Looking at the Platform’s architecture from the data center, you start with a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Our goal is to enable you to create the right environment for a particular application. We’ll do this with an application marketplace that includes both business software applications as well as network function virtualization applications. What’s unique is our vision for near instant ability to instantiate isolated or public cloud or deploy a full range of solutions like managed Hadoop, Spark, SAP, Cloud Foundry or Docker.

The Platform will encompass our vision for a Software-Defined Network (SDN) controller through RESTful APIs to our network capability. In terms of the control of the network, we use traditional next generation standards like NetConf and OpenFlow, but we also have made a big investment in systems capabilities to interface with legacy network elements and their underlying element management system. And of course, our MPLS network will be the foundation gateway to business agility, connecting with a broad ecosystem of external services and all of our platform services.

With Platform CenturyLink we’re creating an environment where it’s easy for our customers to quickly take advantage of the latest technology to accelerate their businesses and outdistance their competition. A single, automated point of control makes for agile, efficient IT management. We’re putting it all together for you. With Platform CenturyLink, it is time to rethink CenturyLink.

Last month we kicked off the “Hybrid IT Files” hangout with our inaugural episode on Data Gravity.   Next up is Hybrid Cloud and I have asked two of the industry’s top experts, Jesse Proudman, CTO from Blue box and Rob Smoot, Senior Director, Cloud Management from VMWare, to dig into the topic to uncover the truth with me. Here’s what we’ll probe… Computing hybrids are a common hybrid out in the industry today and the term gets used in a variety of scenarios. The “textbook” (PDF) definition refers to a mixed deployment model that ensures data portability. So we’ll dig into this and the reality of Hybrid Cloud Computing in the marketplace. Plus, we’ll tackle questions, such as:

• What are the common deployment methods for Hybrid Cloud computing?  Are virtualization technologies kept constant?  Is one technology suite used, or do enterprise architects use diverse vendors?
• What are the real and practical workloads that work in this model, and what benefits does the enterprise receive?
• Are there extreme examples of Hybrid Cloud in practice?  Or does usage follow fairly common practices?

To be missed? No way! It’s going to be a good discussion, so join me live next Thursday, January 29^th at 9:00 a.m. PST watch and join the conversation on Crowdchat and following our tweets leading up to the show at #HybridITFiles.

A series on CenturyLink’s Information Technology team’s move into the cloud

By Bill Bradley, Chief Information Officer, CenturyLink

CenturyLink IT is on a journey to the cloud. This move reflects the transition that CenturyLink itself is making from being a telecommunications provider to a cloud and network provider. As an IT department, that means we have to evolve and become more agile and service-oriented and our strategy has to include cloud. It’s been far from simple, but in some important ways, it’s a new journey that we’ve actually taken many times before.

Since I joined CenturyLink in 1985, the company has grown by orders of magnitude through acquisitions. Each acquisition has brought new systems, assets, people, and processes. We’ve had to integrate thousands of unrelated IT resources into our own over the years. For this reason, moving to a new technological foundation for IT is not a wholly new process.

We actually started this journey about six years ago by rationalizing the number of IT data centers we had absorbed through our many acquisitions. Consolidating applications required us to focus on virtualization. We created a virtual private cloud in the remaining datacenters. Our current work involves taking this process even further using recently acquired cloud platform technologies. We’re moving identified applications in our portfolio directly into the cloud using our own CenturyLink Cloud platform as if it was a third party vendor.

Our move to the cloud is driven by a desire to control costs and increase speed to market. The cloud helps with both goals. Our IT organization is getting out of the business of being the infrastructure part of the solution so we can focus on being the application and business provider of the solution. It also shifts the conversation around costs moving investment from your capital budget to your expense budget for infrastructure and applications. Development teams creating a new solution aren’t waiting weeks for hardware and infrastructure. Solutions begin to be built in a matter of days.

There have been a few hard decisions to make along the way. For one thing, there is no such thing as “moving to the cloud” when you’re a large enterprise. For years to come there will be many extant systems that we need to keep running as part of our core business. Our approach to bi-modal IT and the move to the cloud is to put what we call a “Cap and Grow” process into effect. We “cap” our investment in legacy applications, deriving value by keeping them in production while we innovate around them. We “grow” applications that are strategic to our business, investing in new applications and systems that we can move from on-premises data centers into the cloud.

We’ve taken a portfolio approach to applications, consolidating software assets by 23% since 2010. To make this work, we’ve added service layers and leveraged our own cloud platform to move applications from an on-premises model to either public or private cloud hosting. Products and services are built on a foundation that requires rapid evolution in today’s world. So, we’ve had to adopt different methodologies that allow us to change at the same speed that business changes. When we turn application functionality into an on-demand “micro service,” we use a newly adopted agile approach, fast-tracking the process.

Most IT organizations don’t like change, but I’ve encouraged my team to foster a culture of change. Changing what we do is a path we’ve been down numerous times before, but it’s new every time. The cloud can be daunting, but it needn’t be. My advice to CIOs that are considering moving to the cloud is to stay close to your mission.

In our case, our mission is to provide solutions to our business partners on time and on budget. As a result, we’ve approached the cloud with the same basic principles we’ve always applied: What will it take to provide solutions that are customer-focused, growth-oriented, and cost-effective? That’s our baseline. The cloud is no exception. Everything we’ve done to plan for the cloud and start our journey there is based on these fundamental principles that we’ve exercised so many times before.

Over the next eight weeks CenturyLink IT will be sharing insights and best practices from our journey to the cloud. Please check back soon for more!