TelecomNewsroom interview with Paul Savill, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Products and Services, Lumen Technologies

Paul Savill is Senior Vice President of Enterprise Products and Services at Lumen Technologies, a company offering an enterprise technology platform that enables companies to capitalize on emerging applications that power the 4th Industrial Revolution. Lumen is guided by the belief that humanity is at its best when technology advances the way we live and work. With approximately 450,000 route fiber miles and serving customers in more than 60 countries, the company delivers one of the fastest, most secure global platforms for applications and data to help businesses, government and communities deliver amazing experiences.

At the company, Savill sets the strategy and leads global product management for all of Lumen’s business services, including internet, voice, data networking, cloud, content delivery, security, dark fiber, IT and managed services.

Telecom Newsroom recently caught up with Savill to discuss company differentiators, how enterprises need to be supported for transformation, the ONUG Digital Live Fall event and more.

Telecom Newsroom, Question (TNR-Q): What is the one thing that differentiates Lumen Technologies within the industry?

Paul Savill, Lumen Technologies, Answer (PS-A): Lumen can distribute, secure and manage our customers’ valuable digital assets around the globe across our expansive fiber network, which is one of the largest in the world. That includes connectivity to more than 2,200 public and private data centers, approximately 170,000 enterprise locations and the world’s largest public clouds. We are uniquely positioned to help our customers manage workloads across data center, cloud and edge environments and move business applications that require low latency and efficient localization closer to digital interactions.

The Lumen Platform is built on a strong foundation of a world-class fiber network to help enterprises take advantage of their data by extending this foundation with a flexible digital model that includes:

  • High Performance Dynamic Connections – ability to reach hundreds of thousands of enterprise locations, multi-tenant data centers and public cloud gateways around the world;
  • Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure – gives our customers choice across a range of execution venues that meet the latency and bandwidth needs of their business logic; and
  • Service Orchestration – enabling us to deploy, manage and secure software workloads anywhere our network can reach

TNR-Q: What products or services are you most excited to share with the enterprise community at the ONUG Digital Live Fall event?

PS-A: We are excited to re-introduce ourselves to the market as Lumen. While our name may be new, our history is not. Lumen is already at work inside of some of the largest digital businesses in the world. Years of investment have been poured into our software-defined platform to help business leaders choose the right network locations, computing venues and management models for their applications.

TNR-Q: What do you see as the biggest challenge facing enterprise networks today?

PS-A: One of the biggest challenges facing enterprise networks today is effectively managing the growing amounts of data associated with modern applications. Workloads need to be easily deployable, manageable, and secure all the way from the data center to the cloud to the edge. The Lumen platform combines adaptive networking, edge cloud, connected security, and communication and collaboration to accelerate next-generation business applications and data.

TNR-Q: In light of the COVID-19 global pandemic, what advice do you want to give to enterprise networks for consideration today or in the future?

PS-A: While we have all had to adapt quickly to COVID-19, we believe business will not go back to the way it was before the pandemic, and there will be long-lasting changes. The adoption rate of many new technologies has rapidly picked up pace by forward-leaning enterprises, and we believe this will ultimately result in improvements in enterprise efficiency, innovation, agility, customer experience, and employee productivity. For those of us working in the technology space, this only raises the stakes, because the enterprises that can’t adapt will get left behind.

TNR-Q: What is Lumen’s position on hybrid multi-cloud deployments for the enterprise?

PS-A: Lumen is focused on helping our customers connect data and workloads wherever they need them. This includes combining cloud, network and technical expertise to connect, migrate, manage and modernize enterprise applications across a range of hybrid cloud environments. Lumen is cloud-agnostic, delivering secure, high-performance connections to the world’s largest public clouds. We believe the combined power of the global public cloud with well-connected edge computing resources will help enterprises overcome past restrictions around latency, bandwidth, privacy and reliability.

TNR-Q: How do you define digital transformation and what is Lumen doing to help enterprise businesses adapt more effectively?

PS-A: More and more, a modern enterprise’s value is built on its information and digital assets, and as companies become more global in their operations, those growing digital assets have to be distributed, connected and managed across wide geographies. The Lumen platform enables companies to easily deploy, manage and move these digital assets around the world in a secure and dynamic way, so that enterprises can be more agile and achieve their digital transformation goals.

TNR-Q: What is one of the biggest challenges of enterprise digital transformation and how should it be addressed?

PS-A: Most digital transformations involve leveraging multiple cloud environments and next-gen technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Connecting and managing enterprise apps across a widely distributed environment that leverages these technologies effectively is a huge problem for enterprises today. Lumen’s platform provides high-performance networking, infrastructure management tools, and application service chaining across a broad spectrum of environments to help customers overcome these challenges.

TNR-Q: How do you see the role of converged network infrastructure in the enterprise?

PS-A: For any complex enterprise to work efficiently, it needs a communications network that can operate in a wide variety of environments, matching the cost structure and performance to the particular need of the location, application, or person it’s connected to. This means a converged network infrastructure is necessary, and Lumen specializes in building and managing converged networks in a way that balances cost, performance, and security to suit an enterprise’s particular needs.

TNR-Q: What is the one thing that enterprise companies need to be aware of as they embrace hybrid multi-cloud computing?

PS-A: When thinking about your multi-cloud strategy, the most important place to start is asking the question – “what outcome am I trying to drive?” Considering the most important aspects will help in determining which environments can best support your desired outcomes. Using a mix of data center, cloud and even edge environments should be considered to get technology solutions closer to digital interactions.

TNR-Q: Based on your experience and industry knowledge, what are you seeing enterprise businesses doing with technology that is a ‘waste of time?’

PS-A: The biggest thing is doing technology trials without real business outcome goals established. A lot of times trials happen because there is a champion in the company who thinks it’s a good idea, but they haven’t thought through how the technology, even if it’s successful, will drive financial success in the company. So, when the trial is over, they can’t make the case for funding because they didn’t prove the correct business outcomes.

TNR-Q: What roles should Artificial Intelligence play in the enterprise?

PS-A: I think all enterprises that are forward-thinking should look for ways to leverage Artificial Intelligence in their operations, business decision processes and customer experience interfaces. The use cases are only limited by our lack of imagination, and there is no major industry vertical where it can’t be applied.

TNR-Q: What is the most important driver of change taking shape today?

PS-A: Data is the driver of change today. Success hinges on a company’s ability to acquire, analyze and act on data to adopt emerging technologies and take advantage of modern applications.

TNR-Q: Thank you for your time and for these valuable insights. To learn more about Lumen Technologies, please visit www.lumen.com or find the company on these social platforms: LinkedIn: /Lumentechnologies, Twitter: @Lumentechco, Facebook: /Lumentechnologies, Instagram: @Lumentechnologies and YouTube: /Lumentechnologies.