OREANDA-NEWS. December 16, 2015.  CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE: CTL) has received the 2015 "Company of the Year Award – The Cloud Industry, North America" from Frost & Sullivan, a business research and consulting firm.

The award, based on Frost & Sullivan's extensive research and a survey of IT decision-makers, recognizes CenturyLink's hybrid IT portfolio for meeting the needs of the next generation of technical and line-of-business cloud users for highly automated, efficient, reliable and flexible IT services.

"To support an evolving hybrid IT environment where enterprises match workloads with the most appropriate deployment option and delivery model, infrastructure services of the future need to deliver a high degree of functionality, flexibility, interoperability, visibility and control," said Lynda Stadtmueller, vice president, cloud services, at Frost & Sullivan. "CenturyLink is leveraging, positioning and building on its acquired assets to create a versatile and enterprise-centric cloud portfolio, backed by one of the most highly functional and comprehensive technology platforms in the industry. CenturyLink's forward-thinking cloud excellence is worthy of the Company of the Year recognition."

Frost & Sullivan's research found that the CenturyLink Cloud platform addresses the current and future needs of IT departments. CenturyLink's platform is purpose-built to help organizations extend existing colocation and hosting deployments to public cloud services, and it includes public cloud services, Platform-as-a-Service based on Cloud Foundry, bare metal servers, object storage and many other features.

Researchers determined that CenturyLink's technology platform offers a deeper level of application programming interface (API) integration and greater orchestration across more deployment models, components, and environments than competitors. Because the underlying technology platform supports agile development principles, CenturyLink can rapidly and cost-effectively evolve its service capabilities to meet changing needs.

"The recognition from Frost & Sullivan caps off an excellent year for the CenturyLink Cloud platform," said Aamir Hussain, chief technology officer at CenturyLink. "Our platform continues to deliver innovative capabilities that resonate with customers. From new infrastructure and application services, to novel automation and governance tools, we are excited to offer customers a comprehensive, constantly improving platform to help them in their IT transformation."

Earlier this year, Frost & Sullivan presented CenturyLink with its Asia Pacific Hybrid IT Strategy Award.

In October, CenturyLink announced its leadership position in building a service-centric environment for customers through the integration of its network and cloud services, combined with virtualization functions. CenturyLink's commitment to cloud includes recent acquisitions, adding Database-as-a-Service (Orchestrate), analytics that help companies derive intelligence from massive data sets (Cognilytics) and disaster-recovery services (DataGardens), among other investments.