Telecommunications services and cloud infrastructure provider CenturyLink acquired Orchestrate, a company that offers a managed database service for rapid application development.
CenturyLink officials said the acquisition enhances the CenturyLink Cloud platform with new database-as-a-service (DBaaS) capabilities and adds Orchestrate’s experienced data services team to the company’s product development and technology organization. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“CenturyLink’s customers, like most enterprises, are expressing interest in solutions that help them meet the performance, scalability and Agile development needs of large-scale big data analytics,” Glen F. Post III, CEO and president of CenturyLink, said in a statement. “The Orchestrate database service’s ease of use and ability to support multiple database technologies have emerged as key differentiators that we are eager to offer our customers through the CenturyLink Cloud platform.”
As demand increases for mobile, real-time and Internet of things applications, companies need scalable, flexible databases. In many cases, they need more than one database to provide the social, mapping and messaging features users expect. Orchestrate provides multiple flavors of managed NoSQL databases to save organizations the headaches of running their own instances. Orchestrate provides full-text search, time series, graph and key-value storage through a single API that combines the developer-friendliness and ease of use of NoSQL databases with the reliability of distributed databases, the company said.
Orchestrate co-founders Antony Falco, CEO, and Ian Plosker, chief technology officer, as well as Dave Smith, vice president of engineering, are among those joining CenturyLink.
“CenturyLink Cloud features one of the most sophisticated service infrastructures in the market, with a great interface and lots of options for managing complex workflow and third-party applications in the cloud,” Falco said in a statement. “Orchestrate’s database service takes the same approach to delivering cost efficiency and ease of use. Enterprise customers are increasingly expecting one global platform to provide these services.”
Earlier this year, Orchestrate’s service became deployable via CenturyLink Cloud. CenturyLink’s other recent big data analytics moves include the acquisition of Cognilytics, a provider of predictive analytics and big data solutions; the launch of hyperscale high-performance cloud server instances designed for Web-scale workloads, big data and cloud-native applications; and the availability of automated cloud-based Hadoop solutions. Other recent additions to the CenturyLink Cloud ecosystem include the acquisition of DataGardens for disaster recovery services.
In December, CenturyLink announced its acquisition of Cognilytics, which helps midsize and large enterprises convert “data to decisions” through expertise in big data deployment, management, advanced decision sciences, predictive analytics and data visualization.
Cognilytics provides analytics solutions across multiple industries, including financial services, retail, consumer products, health care, oil and gas, manufacturing, high-tech and logistics. The unit has expertise in implementing big data technologies, such as Hadoop and SAP HANA.
Gary Gauba, founder and former chairman and CEO of Cognilytics, is now president of CenturyLink Cognilytics, where he reports to Girish Varma, president of global IT services and new market development at CenturyLink.
Also in December, CenturyLink acquired DataGardens, a disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) provider based in Edmonton, Alberta. The acquisition gave CenturyLink customers a way to mirror physical or virtual machine data to a cloud environment. The acquisition also gave CenturyLink a disaster-recovery offering for its CenturyLink Cloud portfolio.
“With DataGardens, CenturyLink acquires a mature platform and impressive set of technologists and leaders,” a post on the CenturyLink Cloud blog said of the acquisition. “The product offers multiple deployment options, ‘protection groups’ that ensure that a pool of servers stay consistent, DR planning options, and many other capabilities that demonstrate a thoughtful design and practical technology strategy.”
Meanwhile, earlier last year, CenturyLink announced the commercial availability of hyperscale high-performance server instances offered through the CenturyLink Cloud platform. The service is designed for Web-scale workloads, big data and cloud-native applications. CenturyLink Cloud includes dozens of self-service features that help enterprises run their mission-critical and business apps in the public cloud with ease. With hyperscale, developers can use the same platform to launch and manage advanced next-generation apps.
Hyperscale combines CenturyLink Cloud’s high-performance compute with all-flash storage to deliver a superior experience for Web-scale architectures built on Couchbase, MongoDB and other NoSQL technologies, the company said. Users of the service consistently experience performance at or above 15,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) for a diverse range of workloads. Hyperscale also is ideal for big data scenarios and serves as a complementary offering to CenturyLink’s existing Big Data Foundation Services.