 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here at Moscone West. We're with about 7,000 to 10,000 folks here, so really good attendance at this first event since 2019 and the first with the new name. Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jeff Siraki, the Senior Director of Product Management at Lumen as our next guest. Jeff, great to have you. Thank you for having me, welcome. So look at the website, I always love to see what taglines are and Lumen's website says welcome to the platform for amazing things. Talk to the audience a little bit about Lumen, its mission, vision, value prop. Would love to. So much like a lot of the enterprises that are out there today in the market, Lumen's in the process of transforming. We're transforming to a technology company from our network roots, but we also have roots in the IT infrastructure business. So we're bringing those together and creating that platform for amazing things. We believe that our purpose is to further human progress through technology and how we do that is we're enabling the fourth industrial revolution. So moving into the digital age where everything is, it's all about data, it's about real time use of that data, you machine learning, artificial intelligence, autonomous car, smart cities. So the key tenant that we have around the fourth industrial revolution is data, you need to acquire it. And once you acquire it, you need to analyze it, then you need to act upon it. Cause when you think about it, data is just growing and growing and growing from the phones in your pocket to the devices that are sitting in front of us, it's not going to stop. And information that data is critical to driving business value and outcomes for customers. So with that, I totally lost my train of thought, sorry. The ability to leverage that is critical. Driving the revenue from that. So for example, like machine learning, you can't have machine learning without data to feed the machine so they can start learning so they can look at pictures. Oh, look, this is a picture of a dog. This is a picture of a kangaroo. So that's what our platform enables. So that's what we're building. We're building it brand new, sitting on top of the Lumen networking capabilities, a global network, one of largest IP backbone providers. So we're super excited about what we have. So these days, every company has to be a data company to be competitive, to, you know, well, even to survive. Talk a little bit about enabling Lumen's customers to become data companies while enabling the fourth industrial revolution. So I think that's one of those two seem to be hand in hand. Yes, so with the services that we provide, particularly with our partnership with VMware, we provide private cloud services that we can deploy on the customer premises. So whether it's a corporate office, manufacturing facility, a, you know, logistical facility, so we can provide compute there or we can provide it in one of our plus 60 edge data centers that are located in plus 60 metros. So you don't have to put equipment on premises. That's all connected by the Lumen network, dynamic networking capabilities that connect from a customer prem to edge data center, third party data center all the way into the public cloud. So we can stitch all of that together. So I know you mentioned that, you know, you're, you're, you know, based on your history, you're moving further up the value chain with your customers, but I'm still fascinated by kind of the history of Lumen. And when you, when you refer to this Lumen network, tell us a little more about that because that's kind of a secret sauce ingredient to what you're doing. Yes. So roots in telecom, roots in fiber, and we have one of the largest fiber networks in the world. And with that comes not only breadth, but also capillarity going to the markets. We have over 180,000 fiber fed enterprise buildings. So with that, imagine if your compute's there or if it's in one of our edge data centers, how quickly you can transmit information from that prem to the compute all the way into the cloud to acquire, analyze and act on that data. So that's really kind of the secret sauce we have that, as you mentioned, is that fiber backbone. So I'm going to use the word capillarity at least once a day for the next week. That is an awesome, awesome word because it's evocative of exactly what I know you're referencing. But so you guys are experts in latency bandwidth throughput, those underpinnings of making sure that you can get data where it needs to be that you can communicate between environments. You've got that down. So that's a very, very strong foundation to build off of is I guess the point that I wanted to. Let's see if I was correct. Definitely. My understanding. And just with that capability, really it comes down to outside of the data is the user experience. And with application performance, one of the levers you can pull to drive application performance is network but also location. So you can put more bandwidth at it. You can take, put it on a network with less hops. That's one of the advantages of our large backbone. Or you move the compute closer to the point of digital interaction, which is what we're doing with our Edge platform. So whether it's an Edge data center on prem. Yeah, one thing at theCUBE that we like to do is we dive into those things that sometimes people think are inane and banal because we know how important they are. We have a whole series on the question of does hardware matter? And so we understand that you're delivering higher value to your customers but we also want to acknowledge just how important it is for you to have that foundation. Yeah, I mean, the customers that in the marketplace they're expecting more and more services up to stack. They don't want to have to worry about speeds and feeds. Well, the way we're looking at it is the network has compute endpoints on it and everything has compute. Customers want to run their applications. They don't want to worry about everything underneath it. So that's why we're moving up. So we want to be able to create that platform. You worry about your applications. You worry about development and execution of your applications and we'll take care of everything else. Talk a little bit about the VMware partnership. I see Lumen Edge Private Cloud on VCF. Talk a little bit about that, how you guys are working together and some of the value of what's in it for me as a customer. Okay. We've been working with VMware for decades. They're one of our best partners and our flagship private cloud product is based upon the Cloud Foundation. And it's a tried and true platform that the market understands and they have confidence in. So it's something that they can relate to and they already have experience in. So they're not trying to learn something new, like trying to go out and find resources that can manage Kubernetes. Like that's probably one of the hottest jobs out there. Probably took the wrong career path, but anyways, it's new, it's emerging. Whereas VMware, people know it. There's a lot of people that know it. So why spend time as an enterprise retooling and learning and going to a different platform? So with that, VMware brings that foundation and the security of that, that cohesive ecosystem that comes with VCF so we can provide that dedicated solution to our customers that they know and they trust. Trust is critical, right? I mean, it's table stakes for businesses and their vendors and suppliers. You know, here we are at the VMware Explore event that called the center of the multi-cloud universe, which just sounds like a Marvel movie to me. Haven't seen any superheroes yet, but there's got to be somebody around here in a costume. In any event, talk about how Lumen and VMware are enabling customers to navigate the multi-cloud world that they're in by default and really turn it into a strategic advantage. Sure, it's tied to the network. As much as I'm trying to say we obfuscate it, but network is the critical part to it because you do have to physically connect things and the cloud is their computer somewhere. So there is a physical behind everything. But with the connectivity that we have and the partnership with VMware and the ability to take that platform and either from on-prem, Edge Data Center, third-party data center, or we can also provide that service with VMC and AWS. We can provide it in the cloud. So you have a ubiquitous platform that looks and feels the same no matter where it is. And that's critical to our customers. Again, the switching costs of learning, it's a great product. VMware is a great partnership. They'll bring that all together. So what does a delighted customer sound like? You're interacting with a delighted customer. They're not going to pick up the phone and tell you, you know what, I love your network. What are they going to tell you they're happy about? A delighted customer wouldn't talk about our infrastructure at all. Our virtual machines work. Our applications work. Our software engineers, they can develop against it. Our costs are optimized. That's what they're going to care about. If they start talking about our virtual machines or servers, and that means there's probably something wrong. So we need to make sure that platform that we're providing as a service and managing works. So it's really if your application, if you want to talk to me about your application, that's what's top of mind for you. We're doing our job. Now you share that love with the folks in your organization responsible for making sure that that infrastructure works, right? Yes. You let them know. It's like, look, no one is touting what you do, but it really still is important. It is very important. You want to make sure, so folks happy. Yes, very important. Talk a little bit, Jeff, about how your customer conversations have evolved over the last couple of years as we saw, you know, two and a half years ago, businesses in every industry scrambling to go digital. Have you seen priorities shift up the C-suite stack over to the board in terms of the infrastructure and the network that powers these organizations? Yeah, I mean, over the past couple of years with the proliferation of public cloud, you know, the edicts of got to go to the cloud. We got to go to the cloud, got to go to the cloud. So everything goes to the cloud. It's great. It's good for a lot of applications, but not for all applications. And the customer conversations we're having, a lot of it are, okay, what comes back? Because with cloud creep and costs, it just, yeah, if you're looking at a per VM basis, you know, public cloud works. But when you have an entire ecosystem of virtual machines and applications to support and tell your enterprise, that cost can get out of hand pretty quickly. Are you seeing that? We hear the term repatriation used. Are you seeing a fair amount of that? Yes, we're seeing that. Then the other part that we're seeing is getting out of the data center business. That's expensive, especially if an enterprise has their own. That's, you're talking about $10 million per megawatt, just of capital costs there. So in then, if they're in a third party, you still have physical space and power. You have servers there. You have to assume someone's optimizing those servers. And even if you have a hypervisor sitting on top of it, that's a lot of work. That's a lot of resources and human capital that our private cloud solution with VMware takes away. So that they can, again, they can worry about their applications, providing business value, providing customer experience versus, is there anything on this server or not? Does somebody need this virtual machine? What are all these public cloud spend items we have? It allows us out of control. It allows them to focus. So that's kind of how things have evolved and changed over the years. One of the things that VMware talked about this morning in terms of the journey, the cloud journey, is going from cloud chaos, which is where a lot of businesses are now, to cloud smart. How does Lumen facilitate that transition of a business from cloud chaos to cloud smart? What is a cloud smart strategy from Lumen's lens look like? First of all, you have to have a strategy as an enterprise. You'd be surprised how many of those that are out there that they don't know what to do. And part of not knowing what to do is, do we even have the right people looking at this? And so what Lumen, what we bring is that consultative capability to start breaking down some of those issues. So maybe they do have a hybrid cloud strategy. Have you implemented it? No, why not? We don't have enough people. Those are resources we can bring in because not only provide network and infrastructure, but we also have managed services capabilities. Managed services capabilities we can sit on top of that. We have cloud migration practices. We have centers of excellence around SAP and other services. So let us help dissect your problem. Let's take a look at the landscape you have out there. Find out where everything's buried and dig it up, and then we figure out, okay, how do we move from one place to the other? You don't just lift and shift. And so those are the other services that Lumen brings in and that's how we help them. And our private cloud product, we have it sitting on our edge right in those 60 metros. They can spin up a private cloud instance tomorrow and they can start moving virtual machines from their data center to that cloud as a staging point to either keep it there, move it to another place or move it into the public cloud if that's where the application needs to live. I'm curious about Lumen's go-to-market strategy. Customers have a finite number of strategic seats at the table when it comes time to planning things out, like what you just were referencing. What do we do next? What's Lumen's path to a seat at that table? Are you generally seeking to directly engage separately with that end-user customer or are you going in partnering with others? What does that look like in the real world? In the real world, it's partners working together. No one single entity can provide everything. We have to work together and with our infrastructure layer, we want to find the right partners that can help provide vertical specific solutions that then they can be hardware partners, they can be software partners, but then we can collectively go talk to the market, talk to our customers about what we can help them with and then with our managed services capabilities, that's how we can kind of glue it all together. So that's the direction we're going in. So be very focused or focused on manufacturing and focused on retail because we see the largest opportunities there. That's where we have a strong customer base, strong customer relationships. And that's how we're doing it. We don't want to have an infrastructure conversation. We want to have an outcome and application conversation. That's what every customer is talking about. It's all about outcomes. Is there, Jeff, a favorite customer story in manufacturing or retail that you think really articulates the value of what Lumen and VMware are delivering together? Yeah, we kind of use this one a lot, but it's a really good one. And we've seen clones of this in other opportunities. Manufacturing, smart manufacturing. You need to have the equipment that takes that information. Again, that data from all the IoT devices, analyze it, operate your manufacturing facility because most of it's all automated now. So you can run that facility at optimal production with that compute. You don't necessarily want that compute a thousand miles away. You want it as close as possible, particularly if you look at what if there's a fiber cut, your network goes down, okay, then your factory goes down. That's millions of dollars. So with that compute there, we allow that smart manufacturing capabilities. And that's running on Lumen Private Cloud based upon VMware on VCloud Foundation and it's working great. And it's an opportunity for us to continue to expand. I've seen similar use cases in logistics. It's, yeah, I mean, it's phenomenal what we can do. When you're in conversations with prospects, what's the why, what's the pitch that you give them about why they should be working with Lumen to help them really maximize the value of their edge solutions? It's really the resources we bring to bear. Like we keep talking a lot about network and I'm trying to get away from the network because the network is key to the value proposition but it's not what people look at first. But it's those other resources, the ability to manage IT infrastructure which we've been doing for decades. A lot of people don't know that but we've been doing this a very long time. And then with those areas of expertise, managed services, it's providing that all together and with Lumen's history, the partnerships we have. I mean, we have a lot of partnerships. So we have the ability to bring all these resources to provide the best solution for the customer. And we like to use the term best execution venue. So each application has an optimal place to live and we'll help the customers find that out. And it's really, I mean, it's that simple. We just need to sit down and have a conversation. We can figure out where we can help you and we can get started as soon as the customer's ready. So obviously some changes coming up for VMware in the next few months or so. What are you excited about as you continue this longstanding partnership and evolving it forward? I'm most excited about us working together even more because we have, not only do we have our private cloud products, we're leveraging them for Kubernetes but also our Sassy product. We're partnered with VMware on that. So we're really tied at the hip with these cutting edge products that we're taking to market to help customers solve those problems that we were just talking about. So I'm just looking forward to us coming together more and just getting out there and helping people. Technique of the partnership, excellent. Jeff, thank you for joining Dave and me on the program, talking about what's going on with Lumen, how you're enabling the fourth industrial revolution, enabling customers to really become data companies. We appreciate your time and your insights. Thank you. For Jeff Soraki and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage.