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Hey, everybody. Graeme Scott, vice president of network and mobility here at Telarus. Real excited to be back in the Telarus studios. And joining me here today is the one and only Jake Weaver with Lumen. Jake, how are you, man? Great to see you.
I’m great, Graeme. I’m great. Thanks for having me.
Good. Good. So, you’re now advanced solutions consultant over at Lumen. So you’re here to help our tech advisors with some of the complex things that are happening in the network world, specifically around the products and services offered by Lumen.
Correct.
Right. So one of the things that we’re hearing a ton about lately that seems to be all the buzz is NaaS, network as a service. And I started hearing this term probably a couple years ago from you. You started talking about Lumen’s offerings and what’s there and kinda put it on my radar.
And now it seems like we’re hearing it all the time. So let’s talk a little bit about Naas.
What is it? Why should I care?
Absolutely. Yeah. It it’s it’s growing like crazy. So I’m happy to come in and talk about it, but, really, it’s it’s a different way of consuming network services. Right? We’re kinda cloudifying telecom services. We’re giving customers the power to procure services, to scale it up, to add services, to really make the network perform the way they needed to for their applications, their business use cases, to better serve what they need and pay for what they what they actually use.
Okay.
So it’s, it’s really taken off. We just recently hit our thousandth customer on on our NaaS platform that launched about a year ago.
Nice. And constantly seeing advancements to the platform, to the offering.
Talk a little bit about from the customer standpoint. Right?
Maybe that, you know, that transition from a traditional consumption of network to NaaS, what’s that look like?
NaaS is fast. It’s a fast procurement. So for customers that already in are are lit facilities, they they can literally go into a portal or an API and spin that connection up. It can literally be ready in in just a few minutes. Whereas that traditional kind of buying model takes contracting back and forth, pricing, negotiations.
You have to have that install coordinated, which can take weeks, sometimes months. We’ve short circuited that and really made it easy, again, for customers to to consume it as their business requires, to scale it up, to scale it down, to layer on different security services, things of that nature that that really make it easy to customize the service for their business.
Got it. So talk a little bit about how NaaS is different than a burstable network. Like, we talk we hear that term. We used to hear that term a lot. Don’t hear it as much anymore. Maybe talk a little bit about the differences between NaaS and burstable, which is Sure. A question I get quite often.
They’re very similar. Right? So, I mean, it’s the there’s the scalability aspect of both of them.
With a NaaS platform, customers literally have the ability to scale it up, put it at a certain level that they need it, and pull it back down. And it doesn’t have to be this kind of, well, let’s kinda see what the bill is gonna look like at the end of the month based upon our our scaling needs, they can really be prescriptive about what they need the network to look like for their particular use case at that particular time. If they’ve got, backup situations that that they’ve got predictable increments of time throughout the month that they need more bandwidth, turn it up. Yeah. When they’re done with that, turn it back down to what they need. They wanna layer on security, things of that nature, really makes it easy to kinda consume those services and take a lot of friction out of that traditional telco headache that you and I have experienced for a long time.
Oh, yeah. So as I said, I’ve I’ve started hearing the term NaaS quite a bit. And although Lumen was one of the first ones I heard, there are some other folks jumping into the space now. Mhmm. Talk a little bit about how Lumen is different in the way that you guys are using NaaS.
So a lot of frankly, what makes us different is that last mile, that fiber reach that we have out there in the wild. So we’re able to connect customers at the branch location and take them back to the hyperscalers and the clouds and the data center providers that are out there. So we’re kind of we’ve kind of flipped that architecture a little bit in comparison to what our competitors are doing. A lot of our competitors don’t have that reach to get to the customer prem.
Customers have to still figure out how to get to, the the some of our competitors and get to
that ecosystem of services. Right. So that’s kind of the wild card there. We bridge that gap, call it that last mile, from the customer to the ecosystem with our with our fiber footprint that’s local in the ground.
And all in all, better experience for the customer, much more simple, you know, implementation.
Predictable. They they know what they’re getting. They see the the rates that they’re hitting yes to. They know what it’s gonna look like.
It again, not the burstable model that kinda, okay. We might burst here. We might burst there. We’re not really sure.
We’ll see the Right. At the end of the month.
You know what you’re gonna get Okay.
With our platform. So NaaS is a little more than just network bandwidth. So talk through sort of the catalog, some of the other products that are available through the NaaS platform.
Absolutely. So, I mean, Internet is is pretty pretty basic. Right? Internet on demand, figure out what bandwidth you need and go.
The cool part that we can do is be in the kind of hyper we’ll call it multi cloud world that’s out there. Customers that have taken that that approach, that have deployed, workloads in some of the colo providers that are out there, the hyperscalers.
They can actually spin up that private connectivity using the same connect connection, the same network interfaces that are at their prem today. So they can carve off five gigs of Internet. They can if they’ve need connectivity to one of the hyperscalers, for example, they can do a layer two or a layer three connection. If they’re already an MPLS customer, they can actually use network as a service and add, connectivity to one of the hyperscalers as part of their MPLS today. In just a matter of minutes, there’s no physical infrastructure that needs to be deployed in that scenario. It’s literally just a logical interface to the hyperscalers.
So giving customers the ability to procure different network types in a single platform without a bunch of lifting and hardware that needs to be deployed, etcetera. Right? Just makes it really, really easy, again, in that kind of hyper connected world, hyper connected workforce, multi cloud strategies that that that are, leveraged out there. That kind of network consumption model is is very attractive for many customers that are that have kinda gone down that path. Yeah.
Love it.
So let’s wrap things up here a little bit now. If I’m a tech advisor and I’m watching this, I’m I’m hearing about NaaS, sounds pretty cool, Kind of things should I be looking for within my customer base to determine if there’s an opportunity here to go down that road?
Just, the biggest thing is how much control does a customer want over their network?
Okay.
Do they want to be is it pretty static? They just use it to connect to the outside world and that’s kinda it? Or is it really a strategic, enabler of their business outcomes? Right?
They does the network enable customer interactions? Does it enable connectivity to certain business applications that are mission critical? Do they have particular security concerns and they want security embedded into those network connections like DDoS mitigation services, our Lumen Defender services, things that leverage our Black Lotus Labs threat intelligence to keep the bad guys away from that connectivity
to ensure as much as possible that that connectivity is up and running and able to serve the needs of the business and their customers. So if you’re asking those questions around, hey.
What does your network usage look like? Is it static? Is it scalable? Do you have times a year that that you need more?
Do you have times of month that need you need you need more bandwidth? Do you need different types of connectivity?
That’s kind of that when the light bulb goes off that, hey. This is this looks and feels like somebody who’d be a good fit for the Lumen NaaS platform. Awesome.
And, obviously, if they discover some of those things, you and the team at Lumen, along with our engineers, always available to jump on calls and really dive in there and diagnose the opportunity.
Absolutely. We’re happy to sell next to, sell in front of, sell behind, how whatever that model needs to look like to to make sure that that we enable RTAs for success. Awesome.
Well, thank thanks so much, Jake. Really appreciate coming into the studio here today. I think NaaS is a a very exciting iteration of the network world and something that our I hope our TAs are taking advantage of.
So Me too. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.