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Verizon Migrates to the Cloud with CloudSwitch Acquisition
Verizon, a telco tilted towards mobile services rather than cloud development, is rehsaping its strategy to avoid the fate of Nokia and other mobile companies that failed to catch up on the market trends in time. The biggest carrier in the U.S. announced today it has acquired CloudSwitch, a startup that developed an environment for users to migrate heavy business applications to cloud services such as AWS. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but CloudSwitch is still fresh out of a $15 million funding round (and was in talks about a second one prior to the acquisition).
CloudSwitch will supplement Terremark, Verizon’s cloud subsidiary which it acquired for $1.4 billion back in January. Terremark competes with Amazon Web Services, and is gaining traction now that companies like Engine Yard are leveraging its platform to host their applications.
“It [CloduSwitch] gives customers an interface to port applications to the Amazon Web Services, Terremark and Microsoft Windows Azure clouds while maintaining their corporate security policies, and it also protects data as it traverses the network. This will give Terremark customers another option for network security and control instead of leasing a dedicated pipe.”
CloudSwitch will continue to support Terremark’s competing offerings and its dev team will be boosting Verizon on a broader scale as well. CloudSwitch employees will lead the carrier’s software development.
Users expect their smartphones to be a pocket-size replacement for their computers on the go, and carriers need to round out this concept to remain competitive. Verizon has been doing just that, and successfully it would seem. The company beat Wall Street expectations for Q2 with net profit of $1.61 billion, One of its brightest moves to date was probably its team-up with Skype back at the Mobile World Congress last year to offer free calls to customers.
Verizon has been facing some trouble this month, though. A massive strike and a court order to pay $115 million in damages to Active Video both left their mark on the company.
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