CenturyLink’s Lucas Carlson is leaving after the company bought his startup AppFog
Summary
Carlson’s next chapter sounds like a tech founder’s daydream: moving from his home in Portland, Oregon, to Paris, to write novels. Carlson is leaving a company that has tried hard to compete with top public cloud Amazon Web Services. In addition to buying AppFog — one of the early platform-as-a-service (PaaS) startups — CenturyLink has also bolstered its cloud portfolio through the acquisitions of Orchestrate, Tier 3, and DataGardens. “Historically, much of our growth has been attributable to acquisitions, including our purchases over the last couple of years of several businesses primarily to augment our hosting services,” CenturyLink said in its annual report in February. Through the AppFog acquisition CenturyLink picked up a person who has pushed the adoption of containers, which are an alternative to virtual machines, several of which can run applications on a single physical server.