CenturyLink has acquired startup ElasticBox to better enable its enterprise customers to manage applications services across 12 different cloud providers, including its own cloud and the most popular public cloud options. (See CenturyLink Buys ElasticBox.)

Financial terms of the deal were not announced.

ElasticBox, which operates out of San Francisco and Madrid, has created a multi-cloud service platform for the hybrid cloud world that supports the top platforms, including Amazon Web Services Inc. , IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM)'s SoftLayer, Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT)'s Azure, VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL) Cloud and the Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Compute Engine.

It also supports OpenStack , as well as container technology from Docker Inc. and Amazon, and the Kubernetes open source platform for managing apps across containers.

See the latest happenings as telecom business services migrate to the cloud in our cloud services section here on Light Reading.

All of this is aimed at making it easier for enterprise IT organizations to manage their applications and services in the increasingly complex hybrid world of clouds and to mix and match cloud service providers and private infrastructures, such as containers, based on their appropriate capabilities. That capability will be layered on top of network services and connectivity to the cloud, which CenturyLink already provides.

In the statement announcing the deal, CTO Aamir Hussain promised more innovation from CenturyLink around this capability.

Having ceded the public cloud space to the likes of Amazon and Microsoft, communications service providers are increasingly focused on enabling hybrid cloud connections and management and, importantly, making it simpler, rather than focusing on their own cloud services. CenturyLink appears to be taking another step in that direction by going to the applications management level.

Further analysis of this deal will be published on Light Reading in due course.

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading