“No drink, no ink” – that’s the classic line of an old-school journalist meeting a source at the local bar. So full disclosure up front: I did have a beer at the RVA Tech on Tap gathering on Aug 16, at the Three Notch’d Brewing Co and Collab House. But I paid $10 to attend. That makes my drink mostly a wash between me and the event’s sponsor, CenturyLink.

CenturyLink is still interesting enough to write about for one simple reason: Over the past decade, this company has transformed itself.

It reminds me of Bell Atlantic, which acquired GTE back in 2000, rebranded as Verizon and then bought MCI in 2005. A good opening line when meeting people from Verizon after all that M&A activity was to ask whether they were from Bell, GTE or MCI. I did something like that when running into the hosts at this event, not knowing their background.

CenturyLink’s repositioning as an IT and business solutions provider began in earnest in 2008 when the Monroe, LA-based telco bought Embarq, the former landline business of Sprint. Then it acquired Qwest, the Baby Bell formerly known as US West. Then followed acquisitions in cloud infrastructure and hosted IT, Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), cybersecurity and enterprise software consulting.

The latest move was its $25 billion acquisition of Level 3 Communications, which closed in November 2017. Level 3 was headquartered in Colorado. (I’ve been to its awesome NOC in Broomfield.) But I knew it had local employees in central Virginia; so my opening question to attendees with a CenturyLink nametag was, “Are you Level 3 or CenturyLink?”

CenturyLink vs. Level 3

How those two companies merge in practice is a work in progress. Former head of Level 3 Jeff Storey assumed the CEO role at CenturyLink in March, eight months earlier than expected. We’ll see what happens down the road.

Will the company become more Colorado than Louisiana? That may matter in terms of leadership but is less important in other ways. For a company with a combined 820,00 fiber route miles and local access to more than 350 metro areas across the US, regional geography is less of a signature than it ever was. Across the telecom, IT and media industries, it’s the same story: scale, scale, scale.