Centurylink looking to acquire Rackspace

Interested in hearing opinions you have, were this deal to go through. It's currently splashed all over finance websites.

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shodown

DAMN another one bites the dust. They can't get there own cloud offering going, so they go out and buy one that I actually like.

networker050184

Don't worry shodown from what I read it's not likely going to actually happen with Centurylink. Someone will eventually buy them up I'm sure though. Rumors have been going around long enough.

RomBUS

Wow and here I thought Rackspace was bigger than CenturyLink.

J_86

I'll believe it when I see it. There have been rumors for several months that big names such as Cisco, HP, and Microsoft where going to purchase Rackspace and none of that came to be true.

NightShade03

Oh please...CenturyLink can't get their own stuff together. Buying up RackSpace will either kill them both or not happen at all. I think that RackSpace is really just trying to infuse the market with rumors to keep their stock price high enough to turn a profit/higher revenue or legit get bought out. RackSpace was always an amazing company from a product and customer support perspective, but their revenue model is awful.

darkerosxx

No judgment from me, just curious, why are you guys saying CenturyLink can't get their stuff together? What aspects of their offerings are you seeing as failed or failing and why?

shodown

Where do I start. Every time its a century link turn up its a mess. Especially there SIP trunk in the past. Its always a hassle to get it delivered on time, and its even a further hassle to get a competent engineer who can work on it. I've had good success when I have escalated, but I can't tell you how many times I've had a sip trunk stop working I explain it over the phone that the circuit is up, but the service is down, and the 1st thing they do is take the circuit out of service, run test and they come back clean and says the problem is on our end. We call back go through the same process, but ask to speak to a team lead or manager and finally can get to an engineer that knows what they are doing. If they brought this same type of service to rackspace I would find another provider.

darkerosxx

Oh I meant cloud offerings.

N2IT

Didn't Century Link purchase Savvis a few months ago?

darkerosxx

Yeah, and appfog.

MTciscoguy

darkerosxx wrote: »

No judgment from me, just curious, why are you guys saying CenturyLink can't get their stuff together? What aspects of their offerings are you seeing as failed or failing and why?

After 10 years of dealing with them, I can say, that virtually every single thing thy have put their hands into has been F**ED up.

darkerosxx

Guys, please keep the focus to cloud offerings.

shodown

we know you have to protect your corporate slave masters

. but as you can see they aren't to popular for us who deal with there transport offerings.

NightShade03

Straight from the Gartner 2014 report:

While CenturyLink has an ambitious vision and road map, it will be challenged to muster the resources and agility of the leading providers in this market. CenturyLink will need to focus on midmarket and enterprise customers who need tailored solutions and managed services.
CenturyLink is consolidating all of its IaaS platforms. Previously, it had multiple types of single-tenant and multitenant IaaS. This means that existing customers will eventually have to migrate to the new CLC offering; the older offerings are still being supported but no longer being improved. However, CLC is currently only multitenant, so CenturyLink continues to sell its previous single-tenant offerings, and in some cases, may also sell its other legacy offerings. Current and prospective customers who do not intend to use CLC should consider what they will do over the long term.
CenturyLink is still learning to deliver solutions on the CLC offering, which creates challenges for sales, solution engineering, installation and delivery. Customers who are not simply using self-service on the standard multitenant CLC offering should take extra care to understand how CenturyLink intends to architect and deliver their solution. Furthermore, over the past two years, Savvis customers have reported customer service challenges.

I happen to agree with their findings. Azure I feel has a similar problem. They have a cool offering and it will make a great story, but the interface is confusing, clunky, and I think more money was spent on a sexy marketing site then the documentation and use cases. AWS has their act together and has been in this market a long time which is what makes them such a huge player. Unfortunately that leaves CL, SoftLayer, Rackspace, etc. to fight for the SMB, mid-market, and managed service customers.