Verizon Communications has agreed to sell its cloud and managed hosting business to IBM, announcing the deal the same week it completed the $3.6 billion sale of a massive data center portfolio to Equinix.
The telco began pulling back from being a cloud service provider last year, when it shut down its public cloud but held on to its virtual private cloud business. Verizon and other telcos (such as CenturyLink and AT&T) have been divesting costly infrastructure assets that support their enterprise IT services, switching to less capital-intensive models for some services and pulling out completely from others, namely public cloud.
