Lumen, VMware Expand Collaboration to Increase Innovation; Jeff Storey, Pat Gelsinger Quoted

Lumen Technologies and VMware have expanded their partnership to increase design, development and delivery time of edge computing, as well as deliver more secure, work-from-anywhere systems, VMware reported on Wednesday.

“Resilient edge computing solutions will drive the next wave of digital innovation for the enterprise and customers need the right capabilities to effectively create, deploy, and manage applications in this new environment,” said Jeff Storey, president and chief executive officer, Lumen Technologies.

The combined offerings of Lumen and VMware will enable customers to deliver innovative experiences for any application, to any device, from the global cloud core to the distributed network edge. The companies will also work to deliver low latency and intrinsically secure applications.

“This deliberate move to invest in and accelerate our efforts with VMware will allow us to quickly bring to market software-defined solutions that address the real issues our customers face as they move applications to the edge. That is powerful,” Storey added.

Lumen and VMware will form a Joint Innovation Lab to combine architecture, design, marketing and sales resources to support advanced workloads. The teams will focus initial efforts on co-developing solutions for Lumen’s portfolio of managed services, across edge computing, work-from-anywhere platforms and security.

Edge computing services will enable businesses to create a secure software supply chain to deploy new edge-native workloads, on-demand and closer to the point of digital interaction. With VMware’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform, users will be able to manage distributed workforces. The solution will enable customers to seamlessly adopt SASE architecture to achieve the reliability and performance of a traditional network.

The partnership will integrate VMware Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint and VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload with intelligence data from Black Lotus Labs of Lumen to position customers to combat cyber-threats with advanced security analytics.

“We see an exploding set of edge use cases that will result in every human experience becoming digital,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of VMware. “These trends have only been accelerated as a result of the pandemic. Materializing these opportunities requires strong partnership by proven technical leaders. The Lumen-VMware partnership will provide the exact combination required to transform business processes and customer experience.”