CenturyLink's Cloud Application Manager Gives Partners More Cloud Revenue Opportunities

CenturyLink is helping its partners earn new revenue on popular third-party clouds that their customers are already using. The carrier on Tuesday introduced Cloud Application Manager, a platform for managing hybrid cloud environments.

Cloud Application Manager is an orchestration platform that uses cloud-agnostic application management technology that CenturyLink gained from its from ElasticBox acquisition in 2016. The platform can be used by both solution providers and business customers for deploying and managing private and public clouds, and colocation environments, according to Monroe, La.-based CenturyLink.

Many business customers are already using cloud services from Amazon, Microsoft and Google, so the platform could help partners earn revenue on these sought-after cloud platforms that they didn’t have access to before, said John Hudson, director of service provider solutions for Lumenate, a Dallas-based IT consulting firm and CenturyLink partner.

[Related: CenturyLink Intros Mobile Management System, Key Component Of A New Channel Push]

By wrapping services around popular IaaS offerings -- like multi-cloud management -- partners can pull in new monthly recurring revenue, without simply reselling cloud for a small margin.

"We're excited about it because its revenue we're not receiving today that can be easily pulled in by Cloud Application Manager," Hudson said.

CenturyLink's Cloud Application Manager will give solution providers the opportunity to have a different conversation in the marketplace, Hudson said.

"Because our customers are already using AWS and Google, it’s a really easy transition for us to start asking about their workloads. Enterprises want vendor compression, more visibility, and control of their environments," Hudson said. "Cloud Application Manager is truly a single pain of glass for workloads, whether they are located at AWS, Azure, Google or on-premise."

Cloud Application Manager can help business customers manage their increasingly complex, hybrid IT environments. The offering lets solution providers and business customers build and run applications, and move applications across a multi-cloud or premise-based IT environment. The platform gives partners, and customers access to CenturyLink's managed services, including monitoring, patching, backup and remote administration across any hybrid hosting environment, the carrier said.

CenturyLink's partners are also asking for more automated offerings that will help them better manage and control their customer's applications, John DeLozier, vice president of the CenturyLink Channel Alliance, told CRN via email. "The CenturyLink Cloud Application manager represents [our] ongoing commitment to build and invest in technologies that support partners and customers achieve their digital transformation goals," he said.

Customers can plug their existing public cloud accounts into the platform, or provision new cloud services through Cloud Application Manager. Additionally, the platform can consolidate multi-cloud billing for end customers, according to CenturyLink.

At CenturyLink's partner conference in last, week in San Diego, the carrier also unveiled its new Enterprise Mobility Management solution that partners can use to manage their business customers' mobile devices in corporate environments. CenturyLink also revealed plans to roll out its first tiered channel program, under the direction of channel chief DeLozier, who joined the company in 2016.