CenturyLink may be America’s third-largest telco, but it has innovated to become a diversified global cloud and IT services company by investing billions in technology businesses over the past few years. The inside story is how its fealty to its past informed the invention of its future.
“We started out in the 1930s in Oak Ridge, Louisiana, with a $500 investment for 75 subscribers,” explained Aamir Hussain, CenturyLink’s EVP and Chief Technology Officer. “So in a very real sense our expansion started then, and we’ve applied many of the same principles to our latest acquisitions.”
The company doesn’t look like what it used to even late last century, thanks to an aggressive acquisition and transformation strategy that has added eight companies over the past seven years in an effort to grow as its customers’ needs evolved for more diversified and integrated tech communications services.
Embarq, Qwest, Savvis, AppFog, Tier 3, Cognilytics, DataGardens and Orchestrate were acquired and folded into its offering, giving CenturyLink the capability to offer network, cloud, data recovery, database management, global hosting, and big data analytics to customers around the world.
“We needed to be where the puck was going,” Hussain said, but then qualified that forward-looking idea with a reference to the continuing influence of the company’s founder, Clarke M. Williams: “He always said put the interests of others in front of you, then put yourself in their shoes and do what it would take to satisfy them.”
Read the entire essay at Forbes