CenturyLink has announced the acquisition of ElasticBox to extend the company’s capabilities in the multi-cloud and hybrid IT markets.

ElasticBox, which has offices in San Francisco and Madrid, enables application orchestration for 12 cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, IBM’s SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack, as well as various container destinations such as Docker and Kubernetes.

“The acquisition of ElasticBox strengthens and enhances CenturyLink’s development and deployment of multi-cloud services management capabilities, as well as our ability to deliver end-to-end network and hybrid IT services to business customers globally,” said CenturyLink Chief Technology Officer Aamir Hussain. “The ElasticBox multi-cloud management platform frees businesses to focus on issues that are central to their organization rather than spending time and resources managing multiple clouds.”

Both CenturyLink and ElasticBox offer services which are aimed at simplifying the process to manage applications and services for enterprise organizations. ElasticBox specializes in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, which would sit on top of network services and connectivity to the cloud, an offering which CenturyLink already supports in its portfolio.

While the CenturyLink business started off as a traditional consumer and business communications business, but has been making efforts in recent years to establish itself as a global leader in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions arena designed for enterprise customers. The CenturyLink team have set their stall out to “improve the lives of our customers by connecting them to the power of the digital world, whether it’s providing network connections or adjacent services on top of that connection”.

The diversification efforts have been mainly driven through acquisition, though these deals have also opened CenturyLink up to the international markets. Through the purchase of Savvis for $2.5 billion offered the company global scale as a managed hosting and cloud services provider.