Two key executives are leaving CenturyLink in a move that may show the telecom provider’s shifting attitude on the cloud.
The departure of senior vice president of platform and application framework development Jared Wray and vice president of platform strategy and business development Jonathan King, first noted by Fortune, comes less than a year after Andrew Higginbotham left the company. Higginbotham and King led the purchase of Wray’s Tier 3, which helped CenturyLink build its cloud platform.
CenturyLink’s most recent push in the cloud was its purchase of Orchestrate earlier this year. However, the company has been relatively quiet about the cloud since then. The company told Forbes that it’s not slowing down its cloud effort.
GeekWire interviewed Wray last year about CenturyLink’s dev center, which detailed some of the steps the company was taking to beef up its cloud package.
“Seattle has become this pulse of cloud. It is like the heartbeat. All of the big cloud players are up here,’ said Wray in the interview.
CenturyLink, which competes against Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the cloud, purchased Tier 3 in 2013. At the time, Wray said it was the best outcome for his startup.
“We were able to ‘out innovate’ the market on a startup budget, but the obvious next step for us is to become a much bigger cloud,” said Wray. “Our focus — enterprises — need cloud plus managed services, access to fiber, and a global data center footprint. That’s what we have now with CenturyLink.”
