In today’s world of intense competition and shrinking margins, telcos must gain a competitive advantage by extending their service offerings through complementary technologies, or as in the case of CenturyLink, through acquisitions.
CenturyLink already offers one of the leading cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions in the United States and it recently acquired Cognilytics, a global provider of Big Data and advanced analytics solutions. Cognilytics offers advanced analytics solutions across multiple industries, including financial services, retail, consumer products, health care, oil and gas, manufacturing, high-tech and logistics. The company has received industry recognition as one of the top 100 most promising Big Data companies and won SAP partner excellence awards the last two years.
With revenues from core communications services shrinking, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are continually looking for new revenue streams based on innovative business models. Companies such as CenturyLink see the huge potential to offer full service cloud offerings to their business customers and are making strategic moves such as this acquisition to better position themselves to take advantage of this opportunity. It’s right in line with one of SAP’s core industry initiatives in Telco – to help drive growth from new digital services. I’m excited to see how this acquisition is going to strengthen the existing partnership that SAP has with CenturyLink in their HANA Hosted Services provided by Savvis.
Together with CenturyLink's network, IT services, cloud, managed and Big Data services, the new business entity, CenturyLink Cognilytics, will enable businesses to accelerate their Big Data adoption and monetize their data assets
As Bill McDermott, chief executive officer of SAP SE noted in the CenturyLink announcement, Cognilytics has been a long-standing partner of SAP and provider of innovative Big Data and advanced analytics solutions. “With the acquisition of Cognilytics by CenturyLink, we now have a partner that is even more aligned with SAP's strategy," said McDermott. "We set out to help customers Run Simple and believe the combination of Cognilytics and CenturyLink will further this mission to our joint customers around the world."
The new company will increase its focus on solving business problems for customers and offering a greatly enhanced value proposition through a broader set of fully managed, end-to-end solutions, including:
• A fully managed hosting solution for SAP HANA.
• The cloud-based Managed Hadoop Powered by Cloudera and Hyperscale for Hadoop, NoSQL and Microsoft SQL Server.
• CenturyLink Big Data Foundation Services is a fully hosted managed hardware and software offering that includes Cloudera’s Hadoop solution and consulting on business case development, Big Data environment planning, and implementation services.
Congratulations to CenturyLink Cognilytics on this new venture and we at SAP look forward to helping with your continued success.
