Lumen's Transition to Tech Adjacency

Telarus tech advisers rely on Lumen for comprehensive services and world-class expertise as the company transitions from telecom to tech adjacency. Lumen is focusing on network, security, and cloud to drive business outcomes for CISOs, VPs of cloud, and CEOs. The company aims to provide easy integration into clients’ ecosystems and offer a clear pathway for advisors to guide their clients, becoming the ‘easy button’ for clients and advisors. Lumen is driving innovation in network services with ‘network as a service’ and carrier-agnostic options, offering customizable solutions with low friction. Umesh leads solution architecture for Lumen Channels and encourages Telarus advisors to discover Lumen for a great business relationship and amazing outcomes in the field.

Introduction

Advanced networking, security, collaboration, managed services, and more. Look. Telarus tech advisers are leaning into Lumen every month for their comprehensive services, their portfolio, their world class expertise. And speaking of world class expertise, I have a good friend, Umesh. Umesh, how are you?

How are you doing, sir? Good morning.

Doing great. Umesh leads, solution architecture for Lumen Channels. He has tremendous insight. He can give us a peek under the hood of everything going on at Lumen from a channel perspective and also where you guys are having great outcomes, tremendous wins, doing awesome things for your clients.

Metamorphosis to Tech Adjacency

So let’s let’s explore a little bit. Talk a little bit about this metamorphosis from sort of pure network or known for network Yeah. To really your tech adjacency. I talked about managed service provider.

Some of the wins we’re seeing involve a lot of the tech stack, not just a portion of the tech stack. Let’s jump into it.

Yeah. Sure. And, thanks for having me here.

I think, like you mentioned, right, we are trying to go through metamorphosis from telecom to what I would call tech adjacency, and we wanna extract more value from our superpower, AKA network.

Yeah.

And the goal is to drive adjacencies as the industry transforms and blurs the lines between network security and cloud. Everything’s blurred now. Right?

And drive business outcomes that are truly where the CISO, the VP of cloud really sit and the CEO really cares about.

Yes.

And to do that, we need to create an easy way to consume our technologies or create what I would call easy buttons that they can hit easily, that they can integrate into their ecosystem, and then Telarus advisors can have a clear pathway of least resistance to go from wherever they’re at to where they wanna go with their clients.

Yeah. I love that you said that. We talk about that all the time. You know, let’s meet you where you are today and take you where you wanna go.

That could be an advisor that’s watching this video or one of their clients. Same thing. And when you you know, you name CSO, c CEO, CFO, that’s just the buyer’s table today. Right?

Complex Buying Process

Those are the known people who are coming to the table, and then there’s all of their team, end users, suppliers. So the the buying process is more complex. The solutions are more complex. And you said something that I love, which is, you know, become the easy button.

So talk to me about, you know, how you’re doing that. I see it in real time, but maybe give some specific examples based on service category where you’re really setting the bar for excellence and ease of use.

Network Innovation

Yeah. So when you talk about setting the bar high, we’ve always been known for network. For sure. Yeah. Hundred percent.

But network’s also boring. Everybody talks about network, and then they’re like, okay. It’s boring.

So we’re looking at network differently and driving innovation and extracting higher order value by looking at our assets differently.

So if you hear, we’ve just released network as a service.

Yes.

And what that does is taking traditional access that we’ve had historically and creates a simplistic pay as you go slash grow model that is elastic. Yeah. Creates a net new revenue stream. It does it drives a discussion where we are almost carrier agnostic to a client.

And more importantly, it gives gives them an option to say, okay. I want a fabric. I want a port. I want Internet on demand or VPN on demand.

And it gives them this almost like a menu card of ways to consume something that they’ve historically been driven to try to consume only in a single way. Right? So that’s one way of looking at it.

Easy buttons, the reason behind easy buttons is, again, as we went down the NAS path, we found that there’s three create clean categories where people are looking at. There’s the, again, the fortune fifty, hundred type model where everybody likes custom solutions.

There’s a middle tier where if you compose a good enough solution, which is network with security or network with edge, we can totally disrupt the market.

And then there’s the bottom tier, which is what we call Lumen Digital, which is hands free, portal driven, think a subset of these option one and two that we can really drive into the market.

So the middle tier is where all the bundles sit today. We have released a lot of bundles on our network security, network plus DDoS, network plus managed firewall.

There’s, SASE as a service, network plus SASE as well. So there’s multiple offerings that now a adviser or a client can look at and see it as a very composed way to integrate a new technology with low friction by going with Loom.

New Offerings and Bundles

Yeah. I like a lot of what you said. Like, there’s a lot to unpack there. The most important thing is you know, because you deal with our advisors and their customers Yeah. Is lots of options Yeah.

Can be customizable Mhmm.

Low friction. Right? Yeah. So when you think about that in all that you have at your fingertips, like, you see the whole toolkit.

Is there something that has you the most excited today? Let’s talk about that. And then, also, let’s look down the road map, you know, twenty four months or maybe maybe twenty four months is too long, even twelve months. So what what has you excited today that clients are talking to you about, advisors are talking to you about, and what’s, like, the next adjacent thing, the next big thing on the road map?

Service Chain Solutions

Yeah. So I talked about NAS a lot. Yeah. And I think that’s the that’s shifting the way we’re looking at our current assets.

But under the Lumen digital umbrella, you’re going to start seeing what I would call service chain solutions.

Think threat intelligence as a service, for example.

Okay.

That’ll get built. So all I do is go to a portal, and if I have DIA, I go I say, okay. I have DIA already.

Click. I want DDoS. Click. I want threat intelligence as a service.

Select, and then it says, okay. Your port’s getting rebooted. Within five minutes, you have these services turned on.

And that’s all portal driven available in in the portal on demand. Amazing.

Yes. On demand.

That’s great.

And that that level of simplicity is where we’re really trying to go as our north star for a subset of products because we want to really drive the power of orchestration automation that we can do within the ecosystem because we have the assets. It’s just building the middleware that can drive that ecosystem.

Orchestration and Automation

Well, we see a modern educated buyer wants to click to consume. Right?

Mhmm.

But they also want an expert that’s ready to help them provide, provide guidance for decisions. So they want a guided decision when needed, but they wanna click to consume. So I think Loom is doing a great job of combining both of those things in the market and really shining a spotlight on it. Like, hey.

We’re here if you need an expert. But if you know what you want and you’re already a customer, then you don’t have to wait. You don’t you don’t need a salesperson. Low friction, no friction, right, which is very cool.

Combining Expertise with Low Friction

Look. One of the the great parts about this job for me is I get to talk to guys like you who travel the country, travel the globe. You get exposed to lots of advisers, lots of customers.

Adviser Best Practices

You know, is there something that you wish every adviser would do, like, sort of as your closing thoughts, like, hey. If you do one thing, here’s your call to action. Here’s a best practice. What what’s on the top of your mind that you know that if everyone just took this advice, they’d be more successful?

Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about numbers. Right? So last month, we had a hundred and nineteen deals close predominantly in the IP space. Okay. And when I say IP, it’s vanilla IP connectivity access only. Yeah.

That’s about a thousand dollars, sale, let’s say, per IP transaction. Yep.

I could up that to by twenty percent by just adding DDoS essentials on top of it. Yeah.

Right.

Now I’m not just adding twenty percent on value and revenue, but also the fact that now I opened a net new door into a c into a CSO suite That’s right.

By talking to a security buyer. Now I can also say, I have the same IP, IP port. I can add a zero dollar LUMA network storage quote on top of it and now suddenly being relevant to a VP of cloud infrastructure in the same enterprise organization.

So you’re opening net new stakeholder domains, but with low risk. Yes. And that high reward, it will.

Yeah. Look. I love what you’re saying. I think it truly is a best practice to do the quote the customer asked for and then two to three adjacent quotes just to show that you know their business.

You heard what they said in meetings. You know that they have the adjacent technology today, and you’re back to your easy button analogy. You’re offering an easy button to consume that on the Lumen platform. So that’s definitely a best practice.

We see it every month. Our best advisors and our best Lumen advisors who are selling Lumen are adding those adjacent services on, and they’re doing it in a way that makes it easy to consume. What’s great about this is the customer now, low friction, no friction. Yeah.

They’ll just add as they need it. They’ll come to you for advice, and together, we win more. So, look, Umesh, that’s our time for today. You are awesome.

We love what we’re doing with you and the team. I urge all of the Telarus advisors who are watching. If you don’t have a relationship with Lumen today, it’s time you discover Lumen. Reach out to your Telarus advisor team.

Reach out to the Lumen contacts. They’re a great group. We’ve been doing doing business with them for as long as anybody in our portfolio. We create amazing outcomes in the field.

Thanks again. We appreciate you and all you do for our, our advisors around the globe.

Thank you, Tim. Cheers. Cheers.