Lumen Technologies targets apps, SASE and network security DIGITAL REPORT 2022
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
LUMEN TECHNOLOGIES
targets apps, SASE and network security WRITTEN BY: DOMINIC ELLIS PRODUCED BY: JAMES BERRY 2
July 2022
LUMEN
Magazine Weblink in layers
3
LUMEN
Lumen believes its platform is among the fastest and most secure for nextgen apps and data, providing a strong foundation for a SASE solution portfolio
O
n our Zoom call, I can just make out ‘Talent Winner’ draped behind Chris Smith, VP of product management platform applications at Lumen Technologies, and then spot a stack of exhibition lanyards hanging from the office wall – two small yet tangible symbols of his industry stature and customer-facing profile. For the next hour, we journey down more virtual avenues. In one of the most telling comments, Smith discusses how Lumen is transitioning from an asset supplier into a ‘technology experience’ company; certainly, the sheer variety of products and solutions under its portfolio are testament to its current output and future vision. “Every company we sell to is becoming a technology company – and our job is to support that,” says Smith, summing up the global challenges and opportunities. “Our business is about application experiences for our customers.” One key focus is Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), an emerging cybersecurity concept first devised by Gartner three years ago. In essence, the idea of SASE is to offer secure network services anywhere from which a user might connect, and this converged solution should ideally both optimise and extend the performance of
4
July 2022
CHRISTOPHER SMITH TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, PLATFORM APPLICATIONS INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: COLORADO, UNITED STATES
Q1 2022 HIGHLIGHTS Reported Net Income of $599mn, compared to reported Net Income of $475mn for Q1 2021 Diluted EPS of $0.59, compared to $0.44 per share a year earlier. Excluding Special Items, Diluted EPS of $0.63 per share for the first quarter 2022, compared to $0.44 per share for the first quarter 2021 Generated Adjusted EBITDA of $1.966bn compared to $2.165bn, excluding Special Items of $52mn and $8mn, respectively
Generated Free Cash Flow of $846mn, compared to $850mn, excluding cash paid for Special Items of $48mn and $41mn respectively Full-year 2022 financial outlook measures updated due to the closing of the 20-state ILEC transaction now being expected in early Q4 2022
EXECUTIVE BIO
Reported Net Cash Provided by Operating Activities of $1.375bn
Smith consistently creates world class product experiences through solid product management practices. He has a keen ability to identify and solve customer business problems paired with more than 20 years of experience developing and managing products and applications for the enterprise market. Smith currently manages Lumen’s Platform Applications portfolio, which includes management and investment oversight for the security, SD-WAN/SASE, UCC, voice, and CDN product portfolios, as well as revenue responsibility for these portfolio globally. Prior to joining Lumen through the Level 3 acquisition, Smith was Vice President of Product Management, responsible for enterprise voice solutions and the global data center portfolio.
LUMEN
Lumen Technologies drives next-gen technology with SASE
applications spread a comprehensive SASE “Never before in the across individual solution portfolio. history of network users, premises, edge, The SASE framework engineering have and public/private represents the cloud environments. convergence of customers had the level Not only does of flexibility on where they several established SASE simplify the technologies that want to put their compute application operating aim to merge and how they want to environment, it comprehensive minimises the SD-WAN capabilities consume network” enterprise IT oversight and network security and management functions into a unified SHAWN DRAPER necessary. approach – one VICE PRESIDENT OF ENTERPRISE PLATFORM ENGINEERING, Lumen believes that will ultimately LUMEN its platform is among be better suited, in the fastest and most a 4IR (4th Industrial secure for next-generation applications and Revolution) era, to meet the needs of data, providing a strong foundation to support enterprise data workloads and applications. 6
July 2022
SHAWN DRAPER TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT ENTERPRISE PLATFORM ENGINEERING INDUSTRY: TECHNOLOGY LOCATION: KANSAS, UNITED STATES
Cloud convenience and Edge distribution benefits Its 450,000-route fibre miles provide less than 5ms latency across 97% of Lumen’s US customers, as well as those in EMEA, APAC and Latin America, spread across more than 60 countries. It used to be that companies hosted their applications in their building, but no one’s doing that anymore, as the cloud is more convenient, offers more scale and is decidedly more cost effective.
EXECUTIVE BIO
“We’ve created optional packages, too, such as a SASE advisory service, where we can look at your environment over three months and create a roadmap from a consulting perspective,” says Smith.
Draper brings a passionate and visionary approach to transformation and the application of technology to solve real world challenges. His goal is to revolutionize the way customers consume network to meet the need created by the expanding role it plays in today’s environment. Draper has more than 20 years of experience developing and supporting applications across all segments of the Enterprise and Consumer markets. He currently manages the development of applications and platforms that span all segments of the Enterprise market with responsibility domestically as well as globally. Prior to joining Lumen through the CenturyLink acquisition, Draper was Vice President of Application Development, responsible for the company’s systems development and support across all facets of the operation. Over his time in the industry, he has built an extensive portfolio of experience supporting the company’s merger and acquisition activities and systems integrations.
Digital security, everywhere you need it. Organizations are focusing on digital acceleration by investing in modern technologies across many network edges such as LAN, WAN, campus, data center and cloud. Fortinet is the only vendor to provide the convergence of networking and security consistently across all network edges with AI-powered threat protection to deliver better user-experience. These innovations enable a Zero Trust Edge strategy, which requires consistent convergence across all edges for your hybrid work-force.
Copyright © 2022 Fortinet, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
LUMEN
“ The hardware, software and network worlds are coming together – but the reality is that it’s already here” SHAWN DRAPER
VICE PRESIDENT OF ENTERPRISE PLATFORM ENGINEERING, LUMEN
“We built the cloud edge for two reasons: for customer applications and to build products,” says Smith. “We repurposed buildings into mini data centres, and that’s the foundation for the cloud edge, which is now paying dividends. “There are certain application experiences that don’t work in the public cloud – so we made a big investment in the Lumen cloud edge, as it’s highly distributed.”
Fast-paced changes mean that the days of sending drivers out in a van are being consigned to history. “As we’ve built the platform, we can push software down it – it will look more like a smartphone upgrade – and the cool thing is that it future proofs our customers’ technology position,” adds Smith. “The reality is that we are no longer looking to deliver a host of services through network boxes, but are instead bringing the platform to your location, which gives you the ability to consume at the initial level and add functionality – when and how customers want to do it.” Lumen recently announced it is providing enterprise-grade servers at the edge of the network, enabling blockchain ecosystem Flux to launch new staking nodes and accelerate building Web 3.0 – a decentralised, next generation of the internet built on blockchain. Magazine Weblink in layers
9
LUMEN
DID YOU KNOW...
LUMEN ADOPTS ‘PARTNER INCLUSIVE’ APPROACH
10
Lumen positions itself as ‘partner inclusive’, meaning that multiple partners can be added quickly to its platform. Currently, it is working with VMWare, Fortinet, and Versa, with Palo Alto Networks set to come on board later in the year. VMware streamlines the journey for organisations to become digital businesses that deliver better experiences to their customers and empower employees to do their best work. Its software spans App Modernisation, Cloud, Networking & Security and Digital Workspace. VMware is focused on accelerating growth of its subscription and SaaS portfolio, providing customers the flexibility. VMware Horizon is its virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and apps software - one of the first products to go SaaS with the release of Horizon Universal Subscription at VMworld 2019. Since then, many Horizon customers have made the move from perpetual to subscription, making VMware’s End-User Computing business a leading driver of the company’s SaaS transformation.
July 2022
Fortinet secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organisations around the world, empowering customers with intelligent, seamless protection across the expanding attack surface and the power to take on ever-increasing performance requirements of the borderless network. The Fortinet Security Fabric architecture can deliver security without compromise to address the most critical security challenges, whether in networked, application, cloud, or mobile environments. Smith highlights three distinct customer journeys: ‘Do it yourself (DIY)’; ‘Do it together’; and ‘We’ll do it for you’, the latter of which is the fastest growing area. Smith highlights three distinct customer journeys: ‘Do it yourself (DIY)’; ‘Do it together’; and ‘We’ll do it for you’, to help address varied needs of customers, most of whom would benefit from Lumen’s Managed and Professional Services to successfully implement their SASE solution.
“As we’ve built the platform, we can push software down it – and the cool thing is that it future proofs our customers’ technology position” CHRISTOPHER SMITH
VICE PRESIDENT PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, PLATFORM APPLICATIONS, LUMEN
Also attending the call is Shawn Draper, vice president of enterprise platform engineering. Lumen is the amalgamation of dozens of acquisitions over the years, with Draper working at CenturyLink for over 20 years. “Lumen’s ability to be able to deliver platform capabilities over its high-speed, highly secure network gives it the ability to allow customers and business units to create unprecedented levels of capability,” says Draper.
“Never before in the history of network engineering have customers had the level of flexibility on where they want to put their compute and how they want to consume the network,” he says. “Our low latency network enables customers to place their computer where it’s needed most and that’s the premise behind edge – the ability to operate closest to where the capability is being consumed or data is being created.” Customers not only have access to Lumen’s fibre-optic network, whether through public or private means, but can also extend it to the cloud provider of their choice.
Magazine Weblink in layers
11
LUMEN
“A year ago, around the US Presidential election, the industry was seeing around a million attacks a month” CHRISTOPHER SMITH
VICE PRESIDENT PRODUCT MANAGEMENT, PLATFORM APPLICATIONS, LUMEN
DID YOU KNOW...
LUMEN GOES DIGITAL TO COMBAT DDOS THREATS A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the normal traffic of a targeted server, service or network by overwhelming the target or its surrounding infrastructure with a flood of internet traffic. DDoS is a nuisance, to put it mildly. Lumen mitigated attacks that targeted one company more than 1,300 times – but this number is just the tip of the iceberg. “A year ago, around the US Presidential election, the industry was seeing around a million attacks a month – it was overwhelming for our operations team as we were doing it manually,” says Smith. “Now it’s digital – you go to our marketplace, agree to a few commercial terms, point-andclick, hit ‘scrub’ and we fix it for you.”
“For years we’ve said that the hardware, software, and network worlds were coming together – but the reality is that it’s already here. So, we’re reimagining how we deliver network, security, compute and application integration and support, over the top, as a platform,” he says. “We give the ability to consume SD-WAN across a variety of providers, and expect this year to deliver our SD-WAN services ‘over the top’ – as an Edge Gateway or softwarebased capability and full digital experience. That’s not just installation but extends all the way through activation and management, paired with firewall capabilities.” Smith describes the current focus on experience as the ‘wrapper’. “We’ve done a lot of work to simplify our offers and provide an Amazon-like experience,” he says. “We are reinventing ourselves.”
Magazine Weblink in layers
13
Lumen
Corporate Headquarters 100 CenturyLink Drive Monroe Louisiana LA 71203 T +1 318 388 9000 | www.lumen.com
POWERED BY: