CenturyLink Buys Savvis

CenturyLink is acquiring Savvis, allowing creation of a business unit that will operate 48 data centers located in North America, Europe, and Asia with more than 1.9 million square feet of gross floor space; a national 207,000 route mile fiber network, a 190,000 mile global access network; and a customer list that includes a majority of the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies.

That is a dramatically different customer profile from the legacy rural telecom operations that have been a staple for CenturyLink, and might provide more evidence that CenturyLink plans a future that is quite different from its past. The acquisition of Qwest brought CenturyLink a handful of larger metro markets and the Qwest national and global operations as well.

Some might have questioned the fit between CenturyLink's legacy customer base and the arguably-different profile of the Qwest enterprise and metro markets customer bases. But the Savvis buy indicates that CenturyLink plans to grow beyond its historic rural carrier emphasis to reposition at least part of the company's operations in non-traditional markets and customer spaces.

"With the addition of Savvis, CenturyLink will achieve global scale as a managed hosting and colocation provider and will accelerate its ability to deliver quality managed hosting and cloud capabilities to its business customers," the company says.

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