I feel like I’m being followed by CenturyLink. I shouldn’t be surprised, they should follow me! 😮
But faux paranoia joking aside, it is interesting to see them snapping up two key players in the Cloud Foundry space that have built .NET support into it at an enterprise level. They’re obviously intent on capturing that market. Now they just need to snag Basho and make those services available without being damaged by windows – in other words, enabling the back end and on premise, but remove the (absurd) notion that it ever is put on Windows Server.
With that I add another congratulations to Teir 3 becoming part of the CenturyLink Family, joining the likes of AppFog and others to help build the next stages of PaaS and cloud technologies combined.
Here’s some of the past news of the AppFog acquisition a few months ago.
- CenturyLink News Link
- @alexwilliams article wrapping up the news at TechCrunch
- InfoWorld Article
- Appfog Blog Article on the acquisition by @cardmagic
…and now the Tier 3 acquisition news.
So what does this mean for that PaaS Technology? Especially the elements that I’ve lead, built and been a part of in some way or another the past ~2 years? Well, that’s to be seen, but I have several exceptionally good ideas about what will be done. In subsequent weeks I might even add to some thoughts around this as I have in the past. We’ll see if things keep going the way leading developers want them to go or if this is a sign of consolidation and innovation grinding to a crawl.
It is, after all being consolidated into a corporate entity that has historically had no reputation or focus around developing actual new solutions or a culture that can make that happen. I wish the dev teams of Tier 3 and AppFog the best, but CenturyLink better do well by them or it’ll turn into a standard bleed rate of lost brain power and the innovation trust will disappear.
On that note, congratulations to everyone and good luck!
Absurd is, Tier3 Engineering confirmed to me they have hardly any customers deployed in multiple-data centers. Meaning they are not interconnecting enterprises for demand driven commerce. Missing out on the Amazon effect of bringing online commerce to manufactured goods offline (sticking with forecasting). Doubly absurd, the infrastructure is demand driven, but the applications are not. Alas, B2B friction has huge impedance.
Partly we can blame the template of Windows server limitations extended into enterprise app patterns for years– ERP/ SCM / Sharepoint. Partly it’s senior execs clueless on cloud and pandered to by vendors with apps built before the cloud, and still sold today, optimized with lipstick on a pig for the cloud.
Crazy is San Francisco based private equity firms like Golden Gate Capital and Francisco Partners chose what color the lipstick is. That’s their contribution to US GDP, driving around in BMWs, milking enterprise software firms and customers. http://www.goldengatecap.com/our-verticals/ http://www.franciscopartners.com/investments/
Crazy absurb, Microsoft has superb MSR and teams to properly create developer tools for distributed applications in the cloud, instead its content to suck up on premise Windows applications into Azure, and convince customers they are now demand driven ready business.