If telecom giant CenturyLink Inc.’s proposed acquisition of fiber networking provider Level 3 gains final approval, it will give the company a new set of products to sell to enterprise customers and will fit nicely with its strategy to be a major multicloud network provider. CenturyLink has already made significant investments in virtualization and workload management tools for the data center, and the acquisition will further strengthen its software-defined portfolio.

“We’ll have even more software assets to drive even further into the core of that network,” said Dave Shacochis (pictured, left), vice president of product management at CenturyLink.

Shacochis talked about CenturyLink’s enterprise network strategy and other topics during a visit to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio. He spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor) during the VMworld conferencein Las Vegas, Nevada, and was joined by Ajay Patel (pictured, right), senior vice president of product development at VMware Inc. They discussed a new partnership with VMware, CenturyLink’s tools for multicloud deployment and the value of cloud partners. (* Disclosure below.)

Uses Cloud Foundation architecture

At the VMworld show in August, CenturyLink announced a partnership with VMware to update its Dedicated Cloud Compute Foundation offering using VMware’s Cloud Foundation architecture. CenturyLink has a global network of 32 locations for its private cloud service.

“We don’t have to orchestrate nearly as many technology sets in order to make a private cloud happen,” Shacochis said.

Earlier this year, CenturyLink announced Cloud Application Manager, an orchestration platform with cloud-agnostic management technology. “It now looks at private clouds and other public clouds as just another deployment destination on that multi-cloud management journey,” Shacochis explained.

CenturyLink is part of VMware’s expanding cloud provider program, which now includes more than 4,400 companies that have built their stacks on the company’s portfolio of products. VMware customers can receive cloud resources through either building a cloud platform themselves, obtaining it through the company’s partnership with AWS, or creating a cloud structure using one of the partners such as CenturyLink.

“The Cloud Provider program and the partnership is really about moving up from trying to build infrastructure to build solutions and offer value to our partners,” Patel stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor CenturyLink Inc. have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE