 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, the digital edition. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm welcoming back with one of our CUBE alumni. Paul Saddle joins me to SVP of product management and services from Lumen Technologies. Paul, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. Last time I got to go to an event was AWS re-invent 2019. You were there, but when you were there, you were with CenturyLink, CenturyLink Lumen, what's the correlation? Yeah, well, thanks for asking that question. Yes, so we did rebrand our company to Lumen Technologies and there's a reason for that because really a few years ago, CenturyLink was largely a consumer telecom business. Roughly half of its business was in the consumer space delivering home broadband services, voice services. The other half of the business was around enterprise services and telecom services, but now our company has grown and we've become much more than that. Now the consumer side of our business is much smaller. It's less than 25% of our business overall and we brought in many more capabilities and technologies. And so we really felt like we were at a point where we, and talking to our customers and doing brand analysis around the world because we're now a global company that has operations in over a hundred countries around the world. We felt like we needed to change that branding to represent who we are as terms of that large enterprise services company that does a lot more than just telecom services. And so that's why we came up with the name of Lumen Technologies and as I said, the consumer side of the business still has a CenturyLink brand, but now the enterprise services piece of our company is called Lumen. So as that transpired during this very dynamic time, just give me a little bit of perspective from your customers. How are they embracing this rebrand? Because we know a rebrand is far more than simply rebranding product names and things like that. Yes, yeah, I think our customers are really embracing it well. I mean, we've gotten great feedback from them on the new naming approach and our customers love the name, but they also, more than just the name, they love the idea of what we're doing and how we're positioning, how we're transforming our company to really represent what we do as being a company that delivers a platform for managing and distributing digital applications and digital assets across the world. And as this audience really knows, enterprises values are more and more being determined by their digital assets, whether that is content or whether it's applications or it could be processes and things that intellectual property that companies own. And when we thought about our company and what it was that we really do for our customers, it really boils down to that is that customers trust us to move their most valuable digital assets around the world to place them where they need to be, when they need to be, secure them in place and remove them when they don't need them there anymore. And that trust is absolutely critical. I want to get your perspective on something I noticed on Lumen's website saying powering progress and the promise of the fourth industrial revolution. First of all, what is the promise of the fourth industrial revolution and how is Lumen positioned to deliver progress on it? Yeah, so the fourth industrial revolution, some of the audience may not understand what we mean by that. When there's really been up to now, there's been three industrial revolutions. The last one was the advent of the internet and of electronics. And Lumen and its history played as a big role in the third industrial revolution because of the build out of the global internet. We operate one of the largest public internet networks in the world. And but now we see that technology is taking a ramp up in the next phase of leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, IoT technologies, technologies that require applications and data that need to be distributed in a much more wide basis because compute is happening everywhere in the fourth industrial revolution. And when we say that we're enabling that and we're enabling the promise of that, we are looking at what we do as having a platform that enables enterprise customers to create capabilities that leverage fourth industrial revolution technologies and distribute those around the world on a dynamic basis in a real time basis in the fashion of how cloud has evolved over the last few years. So how are you guys working together with AWS to enable customers to leverage that technology, that power, the ability to get data that they need all across the globe as quickly as possible? Yeah, so we work with AWS in a number of ways in that print. Of course, AWS makes some great products that are based in the cloud. And they do all these technologies that I was speaking about in terms of artificial intelligence machine learning and video analytics or things and tools that AWS is built to be run out of their cloud services. But Lumen works with AWS in that distribution aspect of it and taking those assets and those applications and making them operate on a much widely distributed basis and dropping them on customer premise locations at the deep edge and into different markets wherever it makes the most sense for customers from a performance and economic standpoint to be running those next generation types of applications. And so we work with a combination with AWS to build those solutions end to end for customers. Lumen has a professional services, an IT services organization also that helps customers put together complex solutions involving internet of things. So for instance, we just deployed a factory environment that has a million square foot factory with a high level of automation that's run using these types of analytics tools where we're putting together the integration on the factory floor back to the cloud like AWS. So in the last nine months of the world being in such a different place with or businesses overnight suddenly having to do almost 100% remote operations. How does the technology that you just talked about how does that facilitate a business to keep up and running to not just be able to survive and continue to pivot as they need to during this time but also to be able to really become the thrivers of tomorrow. Yes, you know, and from our position is having, you know over a hundred thousand enterprise customers and operating in regions over the world our perspective, we've really been able to see how our customers have survived and thrived and those who have not thrived so well through this whole COVID pandemic. And, you know, one of the keys for the companies that have really kind of excelled during this time has been their how far along they were in the adoption curve of cloud technologies and things like the fourth industrial revolution types of technologies because those companies were able to dynamically scale up reshift their resources. They were able to act remotely and control things remotely without having to have humans on-premise, onsite, engaging, you know some of the factory things that we've seen some of the work from home situations that we've seen those companies that were not operating with kind of flexibility and scale that the cloud environment and the four IR environment enables have really struggled while the others have really been able to step up and even outperform in many ways from where they were before. Yeah, we've been talking for months on the queue about this acceleration of digital transformation that this pandemic has really forced and seen those companies to your point those that were already poised to be agile to adopted are in a much better position. One of the companies I was talking to you recently has webcams all over the globe and they're providing, you can get it through your Apple TV or I think an Amazon Fire Stick where you can have these virtual experiences going into what's going on in Paris right now and of course helping us live vicariously since we can't travel but that's the whole proliferation of the edge and the amount of data that's being generated and process at the edge to the cloud to the core and getting that quickly to the consumer whether it's a business or an actual consumer what are you guys doing to help your business as your customers leverage the edge in an efficient way so that this accelerated pace that we're living in is actually able to help them drive value. Yeah, we have seen a real uptick in terms of edge opportunities since the COVID pandemic hit and so I can give you a great example of one that we recently just publicly announced and it's with a interesting situation with a company called Cyber Reef. Cyber Reef builds has security technology that they help protect school systems and kids that are now being educated at home instead of in the public schools physically there they're at home and those kids need protection from the internet because they're on the internet all day now and Cyber Reef provides security tools for the public school systems to help protect those children and what they're doing and making sure that they're focused on school and not getting or having bad actors reach them through the public internet. They're doing that that is an edge application because they needed to place their security software control tools very close to the edge deep into these markets with a good connection into public internet and close proximity to the eyeballs of these school children that are around in the area. And so they have deployed across the country across our footprint their platform basically on our platform to support those deployments to help our children as they get educated. So important and if you think about a year ago when we were all in Vegas for reinvent 2019 we wouldn't even have thought we would need something of that scale. And here we are with this massive need and companies like Lumen and AWS being able to enable that. Talk to me a little bit about though what you guys are doing with AWS Outpost. Is that part of what you just talked about? It wasn't for that example that I just gave but we are working a lot with AWS Outpost. And so we have, we see AWS Outpost as a key part of our total edge portfolio of solutions that we deliver. We have been investing a lot in our data centers across the world because Lumen has hundreds of data centers that are deeply distributed into all of these markets around the world and working with AWS on certifying those locations as Outpost deployment locations. We have also used that IT services organization that can provide consultation and IT management services for our enterprise customers we've been certifying them on Outpost configurations. So we've been training our IT professionals on the AWS solution and on the Outpost solution in getting those certification credentials so that we can bring joint products to market with AWS that involve Outpost as part of the solution and build into end capabilities that combine our services and capabilities with AWS and Outpost for combined solution. And can that combined solution help your customers or joint customers get faster access to their data? Because we know data volume is only going up and up and up and businesses need to be able to gain insights in real time. Is this the technology that can help get faster insights or access data faster? Absolutely, you know, that's and that's one of the key value propositions of a solution like an Outpost is that because you can drop them pretty much anywhere in the world that you need to put compute close to the point of digital interaction, then it makes an ideal solution for customers that want to work in that AWS environment and also leverage all of the other tools that AWS can bring to bear from the cloud platform that they offer. But yeah, the place and compute close to that point of digital interaction is what it's all about. And it isn't just driven by performance and performance is a really key part of it because we want to have that fast interaction at the edge but there are other things there too. I mean, sometimes there are economics that play out for many companies that just make it make more sense to act on compute or storage that sits more centrally to many nodes that can be aggregated in a market to that one essential location. We're running across use cases where customers they want to keep that data local because of governance issues or because of privacy issues or because of some kind of a regulatory requirement that they've got that they don't they need to know exactly where that data resides at all times and it needs to be localized in a certain market or a country. And so they're the types of reasons why they would want to use an Outpost or really there's their numerous. So last question, when you're talking with customers I imagine the conversation is quite different the last nine months or so maybe even the level at which you're having these conversations has gone up to the C-suite or maybe even to the board. What's your advice to businesses in any industry that really need to move forward quickly, transform to be able to start harnessing the power that 4AR can deliver but are just not sure where to start? Yeah, so we're just my advice is that they're going to have to embrace the future embrace the, you know, embrace change. Look, we have never been in a period of time where the pace of change has been as fast as it is now and it's not going to slow down. And so you do have to embrace that but when you're, but if you're sitting there struggling I appreciate the dilemma that they're in because like, well, where do I start? What do I try? The thing is that you should pick a project that you can manage and deploy it but when you deploy it and test it make sure that you've got really measurable results that you have real clear KPIs of what you're trying to achieve and what, you know, are you out for financial goals or are you out for performance improvement or are you out for greater IT agility build the measures around that then test the technology that you want to try because we find that some companies approach it and they're kind of like doing it as a science experiment and then they go, wow, this was cool it was a good science experiment but it didn't wind up they didn't capture the actual benefit of it. And so then they can't go in and prove it in anymore and it's kind of like it sets them back because they didn't take that extra preparation. And businesses in any industry nobody has the time to face a setback because there's going to be somebody right behind you in the rear mirror who's going to be smaller, agile, more nimble to take advantage. Paul, great advice for businesses in every industry and thank you for talking to us about what Lumen Technologies is what you guys are doing with AWS to help customers really embrace the capabilities of the fourth industrial revolution we appreciate your time. All right, thank you and thank you to theCUBE it's good to see you all again. Good to see you too, glad you're safe and hopefully next time we'll get to see you in person soon. For Paul Savile, I'm Lisa Martin you're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020.