New Job, Same Place (Kind Of)

For the past 18 months, I’ve been a product manager at a small but innovative cloud provider called Tier 3. We’ve been doing amazing work and I’ve had fun being part of such a high performing team. Last week, we were acquired by telecommunications giant CenturyLink and instantly rebranded the CenturyLink Cloud. The team stays intact and will run as a relatively independent unit.

The reaction to this acquisition was universally positive. Ben Kepes of Forbes wrote:

This deal sees Tier 3 able to scale its existing IaaS and PaaS offerings to a far greater audience upon CenturyLink’s massive global footprint.

…

This is a transformational deal for the industry – Tier 3′s credibility, matched with Century Links asset base and capital base – could change the face of cloud infrastructure as we know it.

NetworkWorld also pointed out how this acquisition gives us the necessary resources to make more noise in the market.

Gartner noted that Tier 3 was being held back because it was not big enough to devote the marketing and outreach resources to attract users to its platform compared to some of the industry heavyweights. Being bought by CenturyLink could help fix that though.

You can check out some other great writeups at TechCrunch, Geekwire, and GigaOm.

So what about me? I’ve been asked to stay on and become the head of product management for the organization. This means shaping our product strategy, coordinating software sprints, and helping the rest of the company explain our value proposition. I’ve never worked with such a ridiculously talented team, and can’t wait to see what we do next. We’re growing our Engineering team, and I’m building out my own Product Management team, so let me know if you want to come aboard!

It’s status quo for the rest of my non-work activities like writing for InfoQ and Salesforce.com, training for Pluralsight, and speaking at events. While I firmly believe that CenturyLink Cloud offers one of the best cloud experiences available, I will still experiment with a host of other (cloud) products and services because it’s fun and something I like doing!