Lumen imagines ‘what if’ to transform into a techco

Lumen Technologies believes the future lies in becoming a platform provider and techco. At Digital Transformation World in Copenhagen in September, Fletcher Keister, the company’s Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer, explained how imagining the possibilities has helped the company execute on its vision to “build a platform designed to meet the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

Two and a half years ago CenturyLink, a US operator with a global footprint, changed its name to Lumen Technologies and began operating under three brands: Lumen, a fiber operator focusing on B2B; Quantum Fiber, a subscription-based digital platform aimed at small businesses and residential customers; and CenturyLink, which continues to serve small businesses and residential customers over traditional copper networks.

Today the company has over 450,000 route miles of fiber and more than 2,200 public and private data centers on network fiber. Lumen has deployed about 100 edge nodes on its network to bring compute, storage and network capabilities “within five milliseconds of 98% of all US enterprise locations in the country,” according to Keister.

Getting to that point was a 20-year journey marked by dozens of acquisitions and integrations. And while the acquisitions delivered assets and new capabilities, “they also brought a significant set of challenges to us as well in the form of tremendous complexity,” Keister said.

This includes complexity of cultures and subcultures, go-to-market models, channels and products – and all the technical debt that goes along with it, he explained, adding that another challenge has been “this big wall of mistrust that lives between our business units and technology and IT needs.”

The result was that Lumen was slow to meet its customers’ needs and capitalize on market opportunities.

“We knew that in order to achieve the vision of what we wanted to accomplish … we had to simplify,” Keister said. “We really had to start making that transition from telco to techco, which is a really easy thing to say, but what does that really mean?”

The first step was to understand how great technology companies operate and emulate their success. Lumen looked to its hyperscaler partners and large enterprise customers.

“They share three important traits,” according to Keister. “Business and IT teams are tightly aligned; Agile and DevOps are the underlying, fundamental delivery model; and they operate on modern platforms.”

So, Lumen began to ask, “What if?”

“What if we were able to break down that wall of mistrust between IT and business and start to align around a common set of priorities and outcomes? What if we were able to deploy Agile at scale with a standardized DevOps delivery model? And what if we're able to modernize our infrastructure and automate our operations?” Keister explained.

Modernizing networks and IT

To deal with technical debt, Lumen launched a strategy that classifies infrastructure and applications as “deployed-modern, made-modern or never-modern.”

The strategy “forced us to make a decision about what parts of our business we want to deploy in the cloud from day one, which parts of our infrastructure and business we were wanting to make modern – to make a cloud-ready – and which we were never going to touch and just let die on the vine or hopefully retire over time,” Keister explained.

As part of the transformation, Lumen trained and mobilized 5,300 business and IT employees in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). The company has migrated over 900 applications to a common code repository, 225 of which are now standardized on a common continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

The new approach means that Lumen can now deploy code on demand, rather monthly or quarterly, which translates into new product launches within months, not quarters or years. The platform approach has not solved every challenge, however. Lumen is still trying to figure out how it can be used to unlock B2B growth, for example, and how to deal with a volume of data that is continuing to explode.

“We know that IoT is a toddler; the Metaverse is in its infancy, but they’re both going to grow up. And as they do, the amount of data that will be created and consumed is going to be beyond anything we’ve seen to date,” Keister said. “While PaaS [platform-as-a-service] and SaaS [software-as-a-service] and cloud have simplified a lot of functional capabilities for us and for people across industries, the one thing that it hasn’t done is simplify the management of data. Because when data lives everywhere, how do you manage it and consume it in a consistently common way?”

The explosion of data combined with AI, automation and orchestration are prompting Lumen to ask new ‘what if’ questions.

“What if we as operators started to think of ourselves, not as network operators, but as data operators? What would that force us to do differently in terms of how we deliver services to our customers?” Keister said. “And as we deploy those data fabrics, what if our ability then to deploy the data mesh with AIOps-as-a-service in support of those capabilities would create essentially the new digital factory floor for the Forth Industrial Revolution on which we could be deploying digital twins for ourselves and for our customers?

“And what if that data fabric and the data mesh extended past the boundaries of our own networks, to include a higher degree of collaboration across networks, so that our customers could simply and easily orchestrate and deploy capabilities across that data mesh independent on what network resources it was consuming?”

What if, indeed.