CenturyLink is leaning more on VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) technology as part of the telco’s private cloud service it offers to its enterprise customers.

CenturyLink has been offering managed hosted private cloud service for about 15 years now, “since such things were even possible,” said David Shacochis, vice president of hybrid IT product management at CenturyLink.

He said the company’s Dedicated Cloud Compute (DCC) Foundation product “has been the work horse of our business for the past 10 years.” The company has worked with four or five different vendors, including VMware, to source the necessary compute, storage, networking, and security for its DCC offering.

But now, it’s going to strengthen its relationship with VMware and move to an SDDC model. “You can think of it as a trend that SDDC models are starting to disrupt vendors that are very hardware oriented,” said Shacochis.

CenturyLink is updating its DCC Foundation based on VMware’s Cloud Foundation architecture. “It is an SDDC stack with less moving parts because it’s pre-integrated with VMware,” said Shacochis. It uses VMware’s vSphere for compute, VSAN for storage, and NSX for networking. The software rides on HPE ProLiant x86 servers.

The private cloud service is available to customers in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific via CenturyLink’s global network across 32 hosting locations on four continents. It’s supported by thousands of CenturyLink staff.

Previously, CenturyLink owned its hosting locations. But in November 2016 it sold its data centers to an investor consortium, which has since become Cyxtera. “We sold the physical assets into a joint venture of which CenturyLink is also an investor,” said Shacochis. “The physical assets are rolled into Cyxtera. But we still control the same amount of space in those data centers.”