Jared Wray Talks Cloud's Future
If the name Jared Wray doesn’t ring a bell, think back to when CenturyLink bought out Tier 3 in order to get into the cloud computing market. Tier 3 was Jared Wray’s company and instead of sitting on a private island drinking fruity drinks while counting his mountains of cash, Wray is at work for CenturyLink. In a candid interview conducted by CBROnline, Wray talks about the future of cloud and how CenturyLink plays into the future of the industry.
When asked why customers like CenturyLink, Wray responded, “They love the hybrid idea approach. We can single source and provide value add on top. This is a big transformation for Centurylink – it started as a rural telecoms provider, now we are servicing the biggest firms in the world and we’re growing into new market segments.”
Jared’s main focus at CenturyLink is the platform. Wray mentions, “All the infrastructure for cloud computing is going to merge with the network infrastructure. That will be the base level for this. My job is to build the platform. “
Wray’s comments continued when he was asked about what makes CenturyLink different than other providers. Wray explained, “We have a fortune 50 company a healthcare and industrial who are working to transform how they handle workloads as they move to cloud. As they are looking at whether to go pure play cloud or look to go internal and are asking which way they should go they realized that they wanted to go hybrid.” Wray added, “They realized they wanted to collocate with a provider. They wanted to start with servers for ERP, their SAP workloads but they wanted to take 25% of their workloads and augment it in the cloud. We are one of the few providers that could deliver that under one source.”
When asked about the future of cloud, Wray mentions, “We’ve been in the cloud since 2006. We’re competitive on price with AWS and all the other players out there. We honestly believe that in the next five years it will consolidate to about half a dozen providers and we believe Centurylink will be one of them.” Wray went on to say, “As we combine our technologies, we’ll have different services from the ones our competitors are offering. And it is going to be about differentiation. That’s what building a platform is about. Taking the services you believe in and enabling them for your customers.
