Lumen and VMware extend partnership, look to deliver innovation at the edge

Lumen Technologies and VMware have significantly expanded their partnership with the shared intention of driving rapid innovation at the edge.

Essentially the companies will collaborate on the design, development, and delivery of edge computing and more secure, work-from-anywhere solutions.

According to a statement, Lumen and VMware will combine their capabilities to enable customers to deliver experiences for any application, to any device, from the global cloud core to the distributed network edge.

This includes interaction-intensive experiences that require the orchestration of compute, network, and data resources closer to the customer to deliver low latency, and intrinsically secure applications. Automated factories, smart cities or telemedicine are good examples of this.

To lay the foundation for advanced workloads, Lumen and VMware will form a Joint Innovation Lab. This will bring together architecture and design, marketing, and sales resources.

The teams will focus initial efforts on co-developing solutions for the Lumen portfolio of managed services in key areas including:

Edge Computing: Certifying the integration of the VMware Tanzu Basic edition with the Lumen Edge Bare Metal service and Lumen Dynamic Connections.

This combination will enable businesses to create a more secure software supply chain to rapidly deploy new edge-native workloads, on-demand, closer to the point of digital interaction.

Work-from-anywhere: Adding VMware's Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform inclusive of VMware SD-WAN and VMware Workspace ONE to the Lumen solutions set.

Many organisations now manage distributed workforces, making legacy solutions including hub-and-spoke-based VPNs obsolete, the companies state.

This initiative will help customers more easily adopt SASE architecture to achieve the reliability and performance of a traditional network, as well as deliver superior customer and employee experiences in a Zero Trust model.

Security: Integrating VMware Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint and VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload with intelligence data from Black Lotus Labs, the threat research arm of Lumen.

Enterprises will be better positioned to defend against cyber threats, right from the end point, using the combination of security analytics from the peered network and endpoint protection and data center virtualisation.

Lumen Technologies president and chief executive officer Jeff Storey says, "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.

"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.

VMware chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger says, "We see an exploding set of edge use cases that will result in every human experience becoming digital.

"These trends have only been accelerated as a result of the pandemic. Materialising 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.