CenturyLink Cloud Positioned in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure

Selected as One of 15 Cloud Vendors Recognized for its Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision

BELLEVUE, Wash. — August 21, 2013Tier 3, a public cloud infrastructure and cloud management platform provider, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the 2013 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service1. The Magic Quadrant depicts Gartner’s analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner.

Gartner reports that “the market for cloud compute infrastructure as a service (a virtual data center of compute, storage and network services delivered as a service) is still maturing and rapidly evolving.” Tier 3 sees that enterprises have expanded their cloud usage to include mission-critical applications. And to fully realize the benefits of cloud computing, companies need to transform the way they approach IT operations. Reducing human labor – replacing that labor with automation, and making that labor smarter – represents a tremendous opportunity for cloud infrastructure providers.

“The cloud is about so much more than fast and easy access to computing resources. The true benefits are in automating the mundane tasks that preoccupy most IT departments today, thereby liberating staff to help transform the business,” said Jared Wray, founder and CTO at Tier 3. “As we believe Gartner’s analysis makes clear, enterprise organizations are becoming smarter about how they leverage cloud resources to improve agility and better align IT with the business. Since the beginning, Tier 3 has focused on identifying which cloud management functions should be automated and has built an integrated offering that enables our enterprise customers to take full advantage of what the cloud can deliver.”

Specific capabilities of Tier 3’s platform that help automate IT activities include Cloud Blueprints™, an orchestration engine that reduces the time to deploy new enterprise application environments from days to minutes, and Groups, a powerful feature that helps users organize, administer, and manage multiple virtual machines as a single unit.

The placement in the Magic Quadrant caps a significant period of growth for Tier 3 in the last 12 months. Recent highlights include:

  • Global expansion. Tier 3 customers may now deploy virtual servers in nine data centers around the world – four in the U.S., two in Canada, two in the U.K., and one in mainland Europe.
  • Partnerships and new reseller capabilities. In April, PEER 1 Hosting, a global web hosting provider, launched its Mission Critical Cloud, powered by the Tier 3 cloud platform. The following month, Tier 3 also released its Reseller Edition, which includes a number of features to help system integrators and other services providers resell Tier 3’s cloud services.
  • New self-service capabilities. Dozens of new features have been added to the Tier 3 platform in the last year, including load balancers, firewall management, and a new S3-compatible object storage service that offers automatic geo-replication.
  • Automation of enterprise application deployments. Tier 3’s Cloud Blueprints™ library has been expanded to include best practice configurations for several Microsoft products, including Exchange, Lync, SharePoint, and SQL Server.

For the report, Gartner defines Infrastructure as a Service as a standardized, highly automated offering, where compute resources, complemented by storage and networking capabilities, are owned by a service provider and offered to the customer on demand. The resources are scalable and elastic in near-real-time, and metered by use. Self-service interfaces are exposed directly to the customer, including a Web-based UI and, optionally, an API. The resources may be single-tenant or multi-tenant, and hosted by the service provider or on-premises in the customer’s data center.

About Tier 3

Tier 3 is a complete cloud management platform for mid-tier to large enterprises, as well as SaaS providers. To bring even more value to customers, Tier 3 has combined elements of the traditional enterprise cloud market with those of cloud management platforms. Tier 3’s suite of cloud products and services include advanced management and orchestration enabling our customers to run workloads ranging from simple development and test environments to the most complex and demanding enterprise applications. The Company is based in Bellevue, WA, with regional presence in multiple locations in North America and Europe. www.tier3.com.

About the Gartner Magic Quadrant

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

1 “Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service” by Lydia Leong, Doug Toombs, Bob Gill, Gregor Petri, and Tiny Haynes, August 2013.

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