CenturyLink Boosts Cloud Solutions Portfolio With IBM Cloud

In a bid to reinforce seamless cloud connectivity across enterprises, CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE:CTL) recently extended its year-long partnership with one of the top-cloud providers, International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) . The company added IBM’s much-acclaimed Cloud Direct Link services to its accretive portfolio of Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections. The extended alliance underscores the significance of CenturyLink’s edge offerings in the face of growing migration of enterprise workloads to multi-cloud networking environments.

Introduced in 2018, CenturyLink’s Cloud Connect Dynamic Connections is equipped with best-in-class cloud-based applications and services that provide a secure and cost-effective platform to access dedicated private networks with ultra-low latency connections. With a real-time network provisioning, it offers flexible cloud connectivity experience that enables businesses to deploy and manage their workloads with utmost agility. The service reduces exposure to external threats by leveraging private and secure network connections. Markedly, this service is available across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.

Notably, IBM’s Direct Link services effortlessly facilitate customer-premise-to-data-center connectivity with adjustable bandwidth options and high-throughput capacity. The direct connectivity, which is specifically designed to deliver superior network performance with low-latency connections, is best known for its significance in hybrid cloud use cases. With a cost-saving model of usage-based billing, Direct Link services provide streamlined customer experience and utilize its cloud storage for data backup and disaster recovery. Equipped with multicloud connectivity, it also permits the enterprises to shift their complex workloads across hybrid cloud environments to IBM Cloud.

With avant-garde network capabilities across 170,000 on-net buildings, CenturyLink aims to provide a multi-layered networking infrastructure for secured and agile cloud computing solutions. These solutions automate application deployments, scale workloads, enhance cost efficiency and manage connections across different operating environments. It is focused on boosting operational efficiencies through various methods, including network simplification and rationalization, which would aid in improving its end-to-end provisioning time and drive standardization.

Moreover, CenturyLink’s global access and extensive Wavelength, Ethernet and IP VPN connectivity options are designed to meet today’s hybrid cloud requirements. The company aims to establish itself as a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions arena designed for enterprise customers. Strong network capabilities, integrated hosting and network solutions are likely to promote growth in its cloud business. Notably, the company views its managed and cloud services as a key differentiator from other players in the market.

Apart from IBM Cloud, it provides high-performance connections to Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) ’s cloud services platform, Amazon Web Services, Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Cloud, Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Corp.’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) cloud computing service, Azure, with more than 2,200 third-party data centers.

CenturyLink has a long-term earnings growth expectation of 7%. The stock has lost 17.5% compared with the industry’s decline of 4.4% in the past six months.

The Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock is currently trading with a forward P/E of 7.57X. It topped earnings estimates twice in the trailing four quarters, missed estimates in one quarter and matched the same in the remaining quarter, with positive surprise being 8.1%, on average. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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