Cloud service provider plays developer card

CLOUD hosting services provider CenturyLink Technology Solutions is playing the developer card in a bid to increase market share. Formerly a hosting and colocation firm known as Savvis, it has changed its name to its parent's in January, having been acquired for US$2.5 billion by US telecoms firm CenturyLink in 2011.

David Rosengrave, head of business development and product strategy for Asia-Pacific, said that the company is keen to court developers and is developing more "shiny tools" in the hopes of pulling techie types to CenturyLink's platform. Going on this route puts the company head-on with competitors such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, which arguably have built better relationships with the developer community.

"Big multinationals use public clouds like Amazon, and there are huge numbers of users which are doing projects on (those) clouds because it's easy. You can choose to wait for the company to give you a number of servers (for a project), or just use a credit card and jump on the public cloud straightaway.