CenturyLink, the third largest telecom provider in the United States and provider of fiber networks to businesses around the world, has acquired AppFog, a Portland, Ore.-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) startup that prides itself on deploying more than 150,000 applications for more than 100,000 developers across multiple cloud environments. 

The AppFog offering will be made available through CenturyLink's Savvis organization and listed in the Savvis cloud product catalog. Savvis, a data center operator delivering cloud, collocation, and managed-hosting services, was itself acquired by CenturyLink some two years earlier.

The acquisition of AppFog follows closely on the heels of Dell's acquisition of Enstratius last month. While Enstratius and one of its key competitors, RightScale, provide multi-cloud orchestration at the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer, AppFog instead has chosen to focus its attention on the developer side of the equation by providing a similar solution for a PaaS-based cloud environment.

"AppFog leads the way in Platform-as-a-Service capabilities and continues to see strong adoption in the developer community," said Jeff Von Deylen, president of CenturyLink's Savvis organization. "Combining AppFog's market-leading Platform-as-a-Service capabilities with Savvis's industry-leading Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud services and CenturyLink's global network will enable developers to securely and reliably operate and connect the applications they build and deploy."

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