OREANDA-NEWS. July 18, 2016. CenturyLink is serious about enhancing the customer experience. Automating our network will allow our customers to have more control over their services by providing them with a self-service application marketplace and on-demand environment. We are now one step closer to making this happen with our recent announcement that we’ve acquired certain strategic assets of the company formerly known as Active Broadband Networks, a provider in software-based broadband networking.

Adding these new assets to our portfolio will help us in several ways:

  • First, it will enable us to accelerate our efforts to virtualize core network functions so we can quickly deliver new, innovative network services – a key step for us in delivering a great customer experience.
  • Second, it offers us more opportunity to move functions into the cloud, making our products easy to access, understand and buy.
  • Third, with these assets we are able to enhance software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) services, making it easier to bring network, cloud, data center and applications together for our customers.

As a result of the acquisition, we will have 13 new employees who now are part of our testing and integration team, focused on building virtual network functions and migrating appliance-based solutions to virtual software solutions.

CenturyLink is aggressively working to transform its existing core network into an SDN and NFV-based environment with plans to have full global virtualization coverage in its IP core network and data centers by 2018. This will allow us to create a customizable and dynamic applications marketplace infrastructure that will give customers near real-time provisioning and control over their services.

We explain more about what SDN and NFV means and the benefits to customers on our corporate and enterprise blogs.