- "We believe we have the scale to compete," declares CenturyLink (NYSE:CTL) cloud SVP Andrew Higginbotham as his company unveils major cloud infrastructure (IaaS) price cuts and new support/service features in response to big price cuts from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
- Higginbotham argues CenturyLink's 56 global data centers and massive U.S. and international fiber networks will help it gain enterprise clients - the company claims its network allows it to provide outbound bandwidth pricing that's 50% cheaper than Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN).
- CenturyLink has 1K+ enterprise customers and is the second-largest U.S. provider of data center colocation services, behind Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX). Its latest moves were enabled in part by recent acquisition Tier 3, an IaaS provider that tries to differentiate by simplifying service management and automation.
- Nonetheless, CenturyLink still has to contend with Amazon's umatched mindshare, feature set, and developer support - Synergy Research estimates Amazon's Q4 cloud IaaS/cloud app platform (PaaS) share was north of 30%, and bigger than that of its top 4 rivals (Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Salesforce) combined. It also competes against other IT and telecom giants (Verizon, H-P, VMware), and independent players such as Rackspace.
- Synergy's John Dinsdale: "The public IaaS market is essentially becoming commoditized ... Companies like CenturyLink have little option but to respond to pricing initiatives from [Amazon] (and Google and Microsoft) if they want to aggressively grow their IaaS revenues."