Programmable Networking Now

WEBVTT
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And I'm here at the Gartner IT Symposium with Lumen at the Lumen booth.
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Scott, how are you?
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Fantastic.
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I hope you're having a good show.
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Having a good show, really exciting stuff going on, particularly in your booth.
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For those who may not be familiar with you and the team, how do you describe your role and Lumen these days?
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All right.
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So, first of all, Scott Yao.
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And my role here at Lumen, I have the honor and the privilege to be the product person.
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So, really looking at how we're building out our portfolio of products and capabilities to help our customers connect quick, secure, and effortlessly to all the things that they need to get to.
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Well it sounds so simple.
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There's a lot of complexity behind that.
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Maybe talk about the complexity of enterprise networks these days behind the scenes.
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What are some of the challenges and where are some enterprises falling behind?
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Well, it's really interesting, Evan, because I've had the opportunity in my role to talk to a lot of customers and really understand where the challenges are broadly in the market.
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And one consistent theme that I keep hearing is that I keep hearing Scott, networking is just getting so complex these days.
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We have networking to the cloud, we have networking inside the cloud, and then more and more as we become multi-cloud, we need to network between clouds.
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And each one of those things is separate and different.
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Architectures are getting complex.
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Every time a new cloud is added, a new workload is added.
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There's a lot of work that needs to be done to orchestrate and manage all of that.
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And and really it's it kind of boils down to the fact that connectivity we fix that.
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Like, you know, with enough time, effort, money, you know, routing, optical equipment, etc., we can get the connectivity to work.
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But how to manage and control it?
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That is really where the complexity lies.
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Manage and control, and you know, the old adage, nope, don't touch the network if it's not broken, sadly seems pretty alive and well.
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Why is adding a new cloud in a multi-cloud world or a new app, why is it still so complicated?
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Well, Evan, part of it is because the technologies that are used for networking inside the cloud is just fundamentally different than networking to the cloud in traditional enterprise WAN.
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And one of the things that we're doing here on Lumen is we're actually modernizing and transforming that entire experience.
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And if we think about what I would call the legacy telco world, this was a world where a customer would pick up the phone or maybe email their account rep, they would talk about a circuit that they need from point A to point B, and then that would get provisioning in arrears of that border.
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And one of the things that we're doing is really taking and flipping that upside down and looking at how can we pre-provision and pre-deploy networking capacity to all of the places and destinations that our customers need to get to, whether it's cloud platforms, AI farms, neo cloud, SaaS platforms.
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That's number one.
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And then number two, how do we take all of that capability and turn it from physical hardware assets to programmable software-defined capabilities?
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Between those two things, we can now create experiences where customers can on demand digitally procure networking capability.
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They can turn it on and off however they want to, they can scale it up and scale down, they can add destinations.
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What used to take weeks and months can now be done in minutes.
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Wow, that's really exciting.
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And talk about what impact AI is having in terms of the opportunity, but also the challenges it it places on the network, your network.
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Oh, absolutely.
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The interesting thing about AI is it has fundamentally exposed a lot of the underlying challenges in networking.
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And a lot of what I talked about, those challenges existed for years, somewhat argued, decades.
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But now that we have machines talking to machines, the network needs to evolve at the pace that those machines and workflows need it to.
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We cannot allow the network to be a bottleneck.
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And so that really has transformed and accelerated the work to program the network, to identify the network, so that agents can also influence and really define what the connectivity models need to look like.
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So there's a lot of that that's happening, and it's the scale at the same time, I think, is another aspect I talked about.
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We talk about the demand on the network for collaboration or typical data access from a human to machine.
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That's very limited.
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We're talking about training models and AI.
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We're talking about petabytes of data that need to move across the network.
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So the scale of what we're doing is just immense.
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We're putting a tremendous amount of fiber capacity in the ground.
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We're on track to get about 58 million fiber miles of network deployed just to the United States.
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That's phenomenal.
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So this idea of a programmable network has been a vision for some time.
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It looks like it's coming into reality.
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Talk about how it's coming into reality and the impact it'll have on the IT teams, you know, managing all this complexity.
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Absolutely.
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So I think, Evan, there's sort of two aspects to it.
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One is, well, in order for the network to be programmable, we have to enable it to be programmed.
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So we have to take those physical assets and allow them to be software addressable.
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So that's sort of the first step.
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The second step is we need to have the right control plane.
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We need to have the right capability to orchestrate, control, and manage all of those capabilities.
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And that, Evan, is really where the Alkira technology starts to become a big part of our strategy.
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Here at Lumen, our strategy is to actually take all of our existing digital capabilities that we have today and bring them into the Alkira control plane.
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We feel that will give our customers a tremendous benefit because whether they're going through the cloud, between clouds, or inside the cloud, they will now have a common way that they can orchestrate and manage their connectivity, their security, their segmentation, all the things.
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But every large enterprise I've talked to is running with multiple clouds at once.
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So I imagine this is a big opportunity and solution for you to help with.
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I do have an think multi-cloud is is here to stay, but it's it's not just a multi-hyperscaler cloud.
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It's also neo-clouds, GPU farms, and mission-specific clouds that may be used for data warehousing or other SaaS type applications.
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So multi-cloud is definitely here to stay, and I actually see that accelerating more than not.
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And you guys know a thing or two about security, securing end-to-end networks and encryption and data protection.
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How do you think about data security in this new world of all this data everywhere all at once?
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Well, we can't really talk about connectivity without security.
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Particularly these days, there's a lot happening here, and just the time to exposure is reducing so much that securing this networking infrastructure, it is part and parcel to our strategy.
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We we believe it to be critical.
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We really think about this along sort of two lenses.
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One is securing our own network and making sure that our network infrastructure itself is secure.
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The second is how we can offer security capabilities to our customers so that they can add security services, whether it's a virtual firewall that can be run in line or our Lumen Defender and DDoS services that can be added onto internet connectivity.
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So more and more you're going to see security capabilities as part of our portfolio and how we expand our reach in that area.
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Brilliant.
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And so you have thousands of customers, so I don't want you to have to pick any favorite children, but are there any anecdotes or customer stories you can walk through, maybe with Al Kier on the networking side?
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I think the uh, you know, change the names of protect the innocent here.
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So I'm not 100% sure which names I can use, but I'll probably talk in abstract.
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So we have quite a few customer use cases, and I think they fall evident in a couple of different categories, but one that I'll touch on here is really around what we call colo simplification.
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And historically, a large enterprise may actually procure anywhere between one and a half to ten million dollars of physical equipment.
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Wow.
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You're gonna spend that much money before one bit can go across the network, and they will physically deploy that in a co-location facility and then actually deploy their enterprise network there.
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And of course, that is capital intensive, takes a lot of time to do that, and it's also operationally complex.
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And so one of the big use cases that we're seeing quite a bit of success with is to virtualize all of that.
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So with the combination of Lumen and Alcura, we can actually virtualize that entire colo experience, move it into the cloud quick, secure, and effortlessly, but on top of that, provide a level of enterprise scale that is not dependent on physical hardware infrastructure anymore.
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So it really scales with the cloud.
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Fantastic.
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Well, you've been pushing the software-defined network for so long.
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It's great to see it's here.
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How do companies get started?
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Maybe they have a lot of legacy providers or legacy technologies.
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What's the the best first step to get going with Lumen?
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So, you know, I think this is one of the challenging parts is you know, where do I start?
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And I I'm really a big fan of just sort of keep it simple.
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And so, you know, what I usually advise is to take a look back at the last quarter or maybe the last two quarters.
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What business objective was slowed down because the network couldn't adapt fast enough?
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You know, was it onboarding a partner?
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Was it a merger and acquisition?
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Was it deploying a piece of security technology to allow for remote access for employees?
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Pick one and we can work together how we can virtualize that, how we can automate it, how we can scale it and really bring it into this digital networking platform.
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You know, Evan, one of the amazing things is there's about uh half a dozen or so leading use cases that we have, but they all leverage the exact same building blocks underneath.
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And what that means is once we can prove value with the first use case, looking at the second, third, and fourth is really just reassembling the same building blocks in different ways.
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There's not a lot of recertification and validation that needs to happen.
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Fantastic.
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So you have so much technology on hand today, but can you give us a peek into the future?
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What are you excited about either on the roadmap or over the next few months or a year?
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Well, you know, we're really excited about a lot of things that we're doing.
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And of course, we're on the bleeding edge in a couple of different areas.
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So I don't know that I want to leak the roadmap too much here, but suffice it to say that there are areas in security that we're investing heavily in.
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So you're gonna see a little bit more from us there.
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Of course, 800 gig is on the horizon.
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Wow.
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So we're having some big investments there as well.
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And when we look at our NAS portfolio, a lot of use cases and capabilities have really taped what Alcura brings to the table from intent-based networking, orchestration, and cloud native networking, blending that with our existing digital portfolio, you're gonna see a lot more variability and reach there as well.
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Can't wait to see it.
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Well, congratulations on a great Gartner expo.
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You have who's who here, including Lumen.
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So uh onwards and upwards.
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Absolutely.
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Thanks for having me.
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Thanks.