Can CenturyLink cloud compete with AWS on price? “Yes we can,” says its cloud chief

on May 1, 2014

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/147437884″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]
CenturyLink(s ctl) is serious about competing with the biggest of the big in public cloud even on (gasp!) price, Andrew Higginbotham says on this week’s Structure Show. Higginbotham is senior vice president of cloud and his words are worth noting in a world where Amazon Web Services cuts core prices seemingly every other week and now cash-flush Google(s goog) and Microsoft(s msft) are underwriting AWS-like price cuts of their own. (Here’s more on CenturyLink’s move.)
It’s not like CenturyLink hasn’t been gearing up for this. It bought Tier 3, a respected but small IaaS and PaaS provider in November just months after snapping up AppFog, a small PaaS provider. And of course there was its $2.5 billion acquisition of data center provider Savvis in 2011. Now it’s putting the pieces together in what Higginbotham characterizes as a massive-scale cloud (the company fields 56 data centers worldwide) not just for new cloud-first workloads but legacy enterprise applications as well.
To win a cloud provider must be both developer-friendly and enterprise-relevant, he said.

Andrew Higginbotham, SVP of CenturyLink Cloud.

Give a listen and don’t forget that cloud execs including Amazon’s Werner Vogels, IBM(s ibm) Softlayer’s Lance Crosby, Rackspace’s(s rax) Taylor Rhodes, Microsoft’s(s msft) Scott Guthrie, VMware’s(s vmw) Bill Fathers and others will all be on hand to talk about the brutally competitive cloud market scenario at Gigaom’s Structure event in June.