CenturyLink on Thursday announced the opening of its CenturyLink Development Center in St. Louis with a focus on automating and developing managed services for business customers.

This is the company’s third development center, joining its Seattle-area Cloud Development Center, which opened in October 2014, and its Monroe, Louisiana-based Technology Center of Excellence, which opened in March 2015.

Justin Lopinot, a CenturyLink spokesperson, tells Channel Partners the work that takes place in the center will offer “many benefits to our partners and the channel.”

“The team is building and enhancing cloud-based managed services and other enhancements to the CenturyLink Cloud platform,” he said. “The platform is a key component and enabler of our partner and channel strategies.”

More than 230 employees will ultimately work at the 46,000-square-foot facility, which features an “innovative design centered on collaborative development,” the company said.{ad}

“CenturyLink acquired Savvis in 2011, and we’ve had a number of developer and engineering organizations based in St. Louis, where Savvis was headquartered and where CenturyLink still has a large presence,” Lopinot said. “A number of the initial employees at the center are from the former St. Louis engineering teams. They had been working in various spaces that weren’t as conducive to the dev-ops approach that we have instituted across the board at CenturyLink. Now they work at the new center, along with others who have been hired as we’ve built this up.”

The need for the new center was based on the environment and location of employees, and the emphasis on managed services, he said.

“The new CenturyLink Development Center greatly enhances CenturyLink’s focus on developing innovative managed services and delivering an outstanding experience for our customers,” said Aamir Hussain, CenturyLink’s chief technology officer. “The center offers an agile and collaborative environment for our developers and software engineers, and superb spaces for client and industry discussions, and also is a key part of our strategy to build cloud-based managed services that drive increased value for businesses.”

CenturyLink provides broadband, voice, video, data and managed services over a 250,000-route-mile U.S. fiber network and a 300,000-route-mile international transport network.