Lumen Technologies - October 2022

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Sustainable practices enhanced by tech

Lumen is a multinational technology company that enables companies to capitalise on emerging applications and power the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR). This revolution is redefining how we live and work, creating an unprecedented need for an advanced application delivery architecture –designed specifically to handle the complex and data-intensive workloads of next-gen technology and businesses.

“We integrate network assets, cloud connectivity, security solutions, and voice and collaboration tools into one platform that enables businesses to leverage their data and adopt next-generation technologies,” says Annette Murphy, who joined the company in 2021 and leads the strategy for the EMEA and APAC region.

“I have witnessed the company’s evolution into one that is very much a part of the technology ecosystem and aligned with the interests of other large technology companies, like those of our strategic partners – Microsoft, Amazon and SAP,” she explains.

Annette Murphy, Regional President of EMEA and APAC at Lumen Technologies, discusses the company’s approach to sustainability and use of technology

“WE KNOW FROM OUR WORK IN THE INDUSTRY THAT OUR INFRASTRUCTURE SOLUTIONS ARE ENABLING SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS ON SUSTAINABILITY”

MURPHY REGIONAL PRESIDENT OF EMEA AND APAC, LUMEN TECHNOLOGIES

VMware Zero Carbon Committed - Partnering for a sustainable future

VMware Zero Carbon Committed providers have set goals to power their data centers with 100% renewable energy or achieve carbon neutrality on or before 2030.

These providers are also VMware Cloud Verified – using the full VMware Cloud infrastructure to provide unparalleled cloud services to their customers.

Lumen Technologies harness the value of cloud with VMware

Guy Bartram, Director Product Marketing & Go-To-Market Specialist at VMware, reflects on its partnership with Lumen Technologies

Founded in 1998, VMware is a leading provider of cloud computing and virtualisation technology, headquartered in the US (California). “We believe that the software we deliver has the power to unlock new opportunities for people and do good for the planet,” says Guy Bartram, Director of Product Marketing & Go-To-Market Specialist at VMware.

He continues: “We are providing the next wave of innovation for our customer base, as well as building a more sustainable, secure future by integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals across the company and aligning them to our core business strategy, especially with our supply chain cloud providers.”

VMWARE AND ITS PARTNERSHIP WITH LUMEN TECHNOLOGIES

For many years, VMware has been in a long-standing partnership with Lumen Technologies from edge computing to workspace and security, VMware has helped Lumen Technologies in many different areas.

“More recently, we’ve worked on delivering a private cloud with the VMware cloud foundation and the Luman private cloud,” says Bartram. Hosted on VMware’s Cloud Foundation ™ , Lumen Technologies’ private

cloud service delivers a public cloud experience that’s encapsulated in a secure and private cloud footprint.

Bartram comments: “Our validated solution offers a consistent operational experience across multiple cloud environments for our customers, as well as having easily replicable blocks that can be customised and builtto-order to meet the specific customer requirements. The solution provides fantastic coverage and a complete solution for customers.”

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE FOR THIS PARTNERSHIP?

VMware plans to continue in its collaboration with Lumen Technologies to drive better outcomes for customers that are looking to move to the cloud, with a particular focus on edge computing and more secure solutions.

“The Lumen Technologies partnership has been very successful, providing a great combination of solutions and capabilities required for customers to transform business processes and customer experience by utilising computer network data services for lower latency and secure applications.”

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Sustainable practices enhanced by tech

“The Lumen Platform is the fastest, most secure platform for next-gen business applications and data, integrating global network infrastructure, cloud connectivity, edge computing, connected security, voice, collaboration and enterprise-class services into a seamless experience. Our reach and our ability to impact the world is significantly bigger than when I first became involved in the technology space.”

ANNETTE MURPHY REGIONAL PRESIDENT OF EMEA AND APAC, LUMEN TECHNOLOGIES

the different ways that our organisation enables sustainability including diversity, equity, inclusion, governance, environmental sustainability, and commitments to science-based targets,” says Murphy.

Lumen Technologies’ approach to sustainability

For Lumen Technologies, sustainability is an integral aspect of its mission and purpose as an organisation. “Annually, we express

Whilst sustainability has been a part of Lumen Technologies’ core operations for many years, Murphy has seen the opportunities surrounding the movement increase significantly. “Our customers are increasingly focused on how they can leverage the capabilities that we provide to acquire, analyse and act on data in a way that can improve sustainability performance.”

“What used to be a lower priority for many of our customers has now become a top priority, as they set their own targets

“OUR CORE MISSION IS TO FURTHER HUMAN PROGRESS THROUGH THE POWER OF TECHNOLOGY”

for emissions reductions, and work to understand how they can collaborate with partners across their supply and value chain to meet those targets. Our platform’s role in this has become crucial to driving these outcomes,” she explains.

Lumen Technologies’ sustainability focus areas and efforts

When it comes to the sustainability strategy at Lumen Technologies – and the company’s ESG strategy as a whole – Murphy explains that the company has taken a “multi-level approach”. Within this approach, unlocking sustainability through innovation and transparency are core tenets.

ANNETTE MURPHY

TITLE: REGIONAL PRESIDENT OF EMEA AND APAC

INDUSTRY: IT SERVICES

LOCATION: LONDON, UK

Annette Murphy is Regional President for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia Pacific (APAC) at Lumen. She is responsible for leading the EMEA region and business results in EMEA and APAC.

Murphy brings more than 20 years of experience in the telecoms and technology industries to her role, which includes all aspects of the company’s strategy, go-to-market and customer experience in EMEA and APAC.

A people-first leader, Murphy is passionate about fostering a diverse, inclusive and collaborative company culture. She currently serves as the Executive Sponsor for Lumen’s EMEA Women Empowered employee resource group.

Previously, Murphy was Managing Director, EMEA at Lumen. Prior to Lumen, she held several senior executive roles at Zayo leading sales, commercial and product teams. She also held senior management positions at Geo Networks and BT.

In March 2022, Murphy was named in Capacity Magazine’s 20 Women to Watch power list, which celebrates noteworthy women from across the wholesale telecoms and tech sector.

SUSTAINABILITY TRENDS IN TECHNOLOGY

“Over the course of the last few years, customer focus has been on somewhat simpler indicators of sustainability performance and ambitions, such as GHG emissions. More recently, however, customers have gained a broader, more sophisticated understanding of the different ways that businesses and the value chain can be sustainable,” says Murphy.

“An example of this within our business can be seen in our stakeholders’ prioritisation of network resilience, as well as the ability to ensure the security and privacy of data, and drive our own digital transformation. These issues weren’t traditionally a part of the sustainability conversation.

“What used to be a narrower conversation around a small set of environmental topics has become a much broader conversation around environmental, social and governance topics. People are realising that sustainability needs to be woven into their business and needs to be a part of how they think about not just their values, but how they create value.”

“We know from our work in the industry that our infrastructure solutions are enabling significant progress on sustainability,” says Murphy. “This can be seen in the growth of universal communications and collaboration during the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of businesses required those services to sustain their business, so we knew that our fibre platform would play a big role in sustainability.”

Similar to fibre, Murphy highlights the significant benefits of migrating applications to the cloud from a sustainability standpoint. “Running your IT infrastructure and operations in a cloud model allows for data consumption to be controlled much better, and for the optimisation and governance of your infrastructure to be much more sophisticated and robust.”

The next level up from infrastructure solutions is collaborating with companies to deliver sustainable solutions that are tied to applications such as smart cities, where the solution is designed with the intent to enable a particular sustainability benefit.

“Examples would be the use of IoT and sensors to enable: reduced energy consumption in buildings; reduced water consumption in agriculture; or reduced waste in manufacturing processes. The solutions that we're designing in coalition with our alliance partners and customers are key enablers of sustainability,” explains Murphy.

“There are also strategic interventions, aspects that we can influence that might not be directly related to our business. These include the ability to support the decarbonisation of our energy systems with the use of Industry 4.0 technologies such as AI to optimise the use of renewable energy by dealing with the persistent challenges of intermittency and storage.

“In these cases, there's a lot of collaboration that needs to happen with

LUMEN TECHNOLOGIES’ CORE MISSION

“Our core mission is to further human progress through the power of technology,” explains Murphy. “One of the great things about our mission is our individual ability to interpret it in our own way.

“For me, further human progress could be enabling customers to optimise their use of infrastructure one day and enabling a startup to deliver a new service the next. There are so many applications that are part of the fourth industrial revolution and equally as many ways technology can be used to improve human lives to create a better, more connected world.”

other companies. To support the digitalisation of those platforms is a great example of how technology enables sustainability across a range of different industries.”

Lumen Technologies and its partners

When it comes to partnerships at Lumen Technologies, Murphy explains that the general ethos is a “‘better together’ story”.

“Our partnerships with cloud providers are a great example of ‘better together’,” says Murphy.

“Most customers going forward will have a hybrid IT infrastructure for the foreseeable future, and cloud will be a big part of that. Having multiple partnerships with cloud, hardware and platform providers gives us the ability to take operational control, providing optimisation and governance across the entire hybrid IT infrastructure.

“Those partnerships ensure that we're able to apply best practices across a range of different areas and use data to drive better business decisions. With these partners, we are seeing tremendous value delivered to our customers.

Partnerships with VMware, IBM, SAP and HPE

“One of our most important partnerships is with VMware,” establishes Murphy. “Their technology enables a number of different solutions that we provide to both our network and cloud space.

“VMware is a key enabler of our edge solutions, as well as the foundational platform for our private cloud solution. But, more recently, we've been working with VMware to understand how their technologies on our platform address emerging issues around data sovereignty and reducing the carbon footprint of IT infrastructure and operations.”

“Those same issues that we tackle with VMware are also what drive our partnership

with companies like SAP and IBM,” says Murphy. “Their customer engagements are driven by the need to develop new business systems and accounting systems to support carbon accounting and other emerging issues.”

She adds: “Our platform enables them to deploy those solutions at scale, in a way that's more cost-effective and better integrated with existing systems.”

“Finally, our partnership with HPE is also very valuable. We want to ensure that the hardware that we use has the least environmental impact possible over the course of its entire life cycle,” says Murphy.

“Our partnership with HPE ensures that we have not only the best hardware going in, but that our hardware also contains a relatively low level of embedded carbon, can be easily recycled and repurposed, and has a very long life that can be extended to keep the hardware out of the waste stream as long as possible.”

“TO SUPPORT THE DIGITALISATION OF THOSE PLATFORMS IS A GREAT EXAMPLE OF HOW TECHNOLOGY ENABLES SUSTAINABILITY ACROSS A RANGE OF DIFFERENT INDUSTRIES”

ANNETTE MURPHY REGIONAL PRESIDENT OF EMEA AND APAC, LUMEN TECHNOLOGIES

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