One of the more rapidly developing corners of the bandwidth market is direct connectivity to cloud resources for enterprises. Level 3 Communications (NYSE:LVLT, news, filings) yesterday unveiled its own approach to this rapidly developing market niche with the launch of its Cloud Connect Solutions portfolio. They’re offering private network connectivity between enterprises and the major cloud vendors out there, bringing dedicated bandwidth to the cloud applications many enterprises are moving to, or thinking about moving to as the case may be.
It’s not Level 3’s first foray into this segment of course, they’ve been offering AWS Direct services for some time. And such products are not even very different from the kind of thing network operators have been doing for years. It’s just a matter of tuning the portfolio to best reach the enterprise market — which has traditionally been more about internet access, voice, VPNs, backup, etc. Given Level 3’s deep data center penetration, its national metro footprint, and a rapidly evolving and dynamic cloud services marketplace, it’s looking like a nice opportunity for them to make inroads into the enterprise market against the incumbents.
Meanwhile, Level 3 had a second enterprise contract win down in South America this week. The Chilean deaprtment store and financial services company Ripley S.A. is expanding its foothold in Colombia to the north, where it has three new stores going up. Level 3 will be supplying data center and managed network services to power the communications needed in both the new locations and in and between Santiago and Bogota as well.
South America has been the locus of Level 3’s best market traction ever since the Global Crossing deal closed. The company’s stock price has been surging of late, however, partly on optimism that their traction in US markets is also gaining some steam.
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Categories: Cloud Computing · Internet Backbones
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Operators in Brazil are talking of a double fault on the L3 SAC network. Cable cut off the coast of Rio which apparently happened a couple of weeks ago, and a simultaneous failure on PAC, but there doesn’t seem to be a single piece of news about this.
That’s the first I’ve heard of it, will look into it.
Think you missed TW Telecom doing the same, with an interesting player I did not expect: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bluelock-announces-dynamic-disaster-recovery-173000177.html
They’ve previously said they do AWS Direct Connect too. Not to hijack, but just sayin’…
This is a core product for all CLECs with strong connectivity to cloud providers. Level 3 surely sold these services before. The only thing new is the name.
I used to sell Ethernet and MPLS. Now I sell Ethernet and MPLS to a port at this data center. Whats old is new again!