 Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re-invent 2022. We're in Vegas, lovely Las Vegas, beautiful outside. Although I've only seen outside today once, but very excited to be at re-invent. There's, we're hearing between 50,000 and 70,000 attendees and it's insane. But if people are ready to be back this morning's keynote by CEO, Adam Slipsky was full of great messages, big focus on data, customers, partners, the ecosystem, so excited. I'm very pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, David Chicoches, VP Enterprise Portfolio Strategy Product Management at Lumen. David, come on back. It's good to be here. Five, the Five Timers Club. You were the Five Timers Club. This is, this is David's fifth appearance on the show and we were talking before we went live. You do the jacket now or we do the jacket later? Yeah, the jacket will come later. Okay. The Five Timers Club like on SNL, we're going to have that for theCUBE. Well, we'll get you, we'll get you measured up and get, get that all fitted for you. That'd be better. So talk a little bit about Lumen because last time you here, it wasn't Lumen. We weren't Lumen last time. So this is the first time, last time we were here on theCUBE at Reinvent. This was probably 2019 or so. We were a different company. The company was called CenturyLink back then. We rebranded in 2020 to really represent our identity as a delivery of, as a solutions provider over our fiber network. So Lumen is the corporate brand, the company name. It represents basically a lot of the fiber that's been laid throughout the world and in North America and in enterprise, metropolitan areas over the past 10 to 15 years. You know, companies like CenturyLink and Quest and level three, all those companies have really rolled up into building that core asset of the network. So Lumen is, is really the brand for the 21st century for the company, really focused on delivering services for the enterprise and then delivering a lot of value added services around that core network asset. So rebranding during the pandemic, what's been the customer feedback and sentiment? Yeah, I think customers have really actually appreciated it as certainly a more technology oriented brand, right? Sort of shifting away a little bit from some of the communications and telecom background of the company and the heritage, and while those assets that were built up during that period of time have been substantial and we still build off of those assets going forward, really what a lot of the customer feedback has been is that it puts us in a posture to be a little bit more of a business solutions provider for customers, right? So there's a lot of things that we can do with that core network asset, the fiber networking, a lot of the services that we launch on that in terms of public IP, you know, public internet capacity, private networking, private VPNs, VoIP and voice services, these are services that you'd expect from a company like that, but there's a lot of services inside the Lumen brand that you might surprise you, right? There are, there's an edge computing capability that can deliver five milliseconds of latency within 95% of North American enterprise. There's a threat detection lab that goes and takes all of the traffic flowing over the public side of our network and analyzes it in a data lake and turns it into threat intelligence that we then offer up to our customers on a subscription basis. There's a production house that goes in, you know, there's production networking for major sports arenas and sports events. There's a wide range of services inside of Lumen that really what the Lumen brand allows us to do is start talking about what those services can do and what networking can do for our customers in the enterprise in a more comprehensive way. So good changes, big brand changes for Lumen in the last couple of years. Also, I mean, during a time of such turmoil in the world, we've seen work change dramatically, you know? Everybody, companies had to pivot massively quickly a couple of years ago, almost approaching three years ago, which is crazy, to be digital because they had to be able to survive. Now they're looking at being able to thrive, but now we're also in this hybrid work environment. The future of work has changed. Almost permanently. How is Lumen positioned to adjust some of the permanent changes to the work environments? Like the last time we were in then in person, this didn't exist. He's right. So the really, it's one of the things we talk to our customers almost the most about is this idea of the future of work. And we really think about the future of work as about workers and workloads and the networks that connect them. You think about how much all of those domains are shifting and changing what we were talking about. And it's very easy for all of us to conceptualize what the changing face of the worker looks like, whether those are knowledge workers or frontline workers, the venues in which people are working, the environments and the connectivity, predictability of those work desk environments changes so significantly, but workloads are changing. And we're sitting here at a trade show that does nothing but celebrate the transformation of workloads. Workloads running in ways and business logic and capturing of data and analysis of data. The changing methodologies and the changing formats of workloads and then the changing venues for workloads. The workloads are running in places that never used to be data centers before. Workloads are running in interesting places and in different and challenging locations for what didn't used to be the data center. So the workers and the workloads are in a very dynamic situation and the networks that connect them have to be dynamic and they have to be flexible. And that's really why a lot of what Lumen invests in is working on the networks that connect workers and workloads both from a visibility and a managed services perspective to make sure that we're removing blind spots and then removing potential choke points and capacity issues. But then also being adaptable and dynamic enough to be able to go and reconfigure that network to reach all of the different places that workers and workloads used to are going to evolve into. What you'll find in a lot of cases, the workers, a common scenario in the enterprise, a 500 person company with five offices and maybe one major facility, that's now a 505 office company. The challenge of the network and the challenge of connecting workers and workloads is really one of the main conversations we have with our customers heading into this 21st century. What are some of the things that they're looking forward to in terms of embracing the future of work, knowing this is probably how it's going to remain? Yeah, I think companies are really starting to experiment carefully and start to think about what they can do and certainly think about what they can do in the cloud. Things like what the AWS platform allows them to do, what some of the AWS abstractions and the AWS services allow them to start writing software for. And they're starting to really carefully but very creatively and reach out into their base of enterprise data, their base of enterprise value to start running some experiments. We actually had a really interesting example of that in a session that Lumen shared here at re-invent yesterday. For the few hundred people that were there, I think we got a lot of great feedback. It was a really interesting session about the really gets at this issue of the future of work and the changing ways that people are working. It actually was a really cool use case we worked on with Major League Baseball, Fox Sports and AWS with using the Lumen network to essentially virtualize the production truck. And so you've all heard that the sports metaphor of the folks in the booth were sitting there and started looking down and they're saying, oh, great job by the guys or the gals in the truck that are bringing that replay or great camera angle. They're always talking about the team and the production truck. Well, that production truck is literally a truck sitting outside the stadium, full of electronics and software and gear. We were able to go and for a Major League Baseball game in back in August, we were able to go and work with AWS using the Lumen network, working with our partners and our customers at Fox Sports and virtualize all that gear inside the truck. That's outstanding. Yeah, so it was a live game. They simulcast it, right? So we did our part of the broadcast and many hundreds of people saw that live broadcast as the first time they tried doing it. But to your point, what our enterprise is doing, they're really starting to experiment, sort of push the envelope, where they're kind of running things in new ways. Obviously hedging their bets and sort of moving their way and sort of blue-green testing their way into the future by trying things out. But this is a massive revenue opportunity for a Major League Baseball game, a premier Sunday night baseball contest between the Yankees and the Cardinals. We were able to go and take the entire truck, virtualize it down to a small rack of connectivity gear, basically have that production network run over redundant fiber paths on the Lumen network up into AWS. And AWS is where all that software worked. The technical director of the show, sitting in his office in North Carolina, sound engineers sitting on his porch in Connecticut. They were able to go and do the work of production anywhere while connected to AWS. And then using the Lumen network, where the high-powered capabilities of Lumen's network underlay to be able to go and design a network topology and a work topology that really wasn't possible before. Right. It's nice to hear to your point that customers are really embracing experimentation. That's challenging to do. Obviously there was a big massive forcing function a couple of years ago where they didn't have a choice that they wanted to survive and eventually succeed and grow. But the mindset of experimentation requires cultural change. And that's a hard thing to do, especially for, I would think, legacy organizations like Major League Baseball. But it sounds like they have the appetite, they have the interest. They've been a fairly innovative organization for some time, but you're right. That idea of experimenting and that idea of trying out new things, many people have observed. It's that forcing function of the pandemic that really drove a lot of organizations to go and make a lot of moves really quickly and then they realized, oh, wait a minute. You know, there's the, I guess there's some sort of storytelling metaphor in there at some point of people realizing, oh wait, I can swim in these waters, right? I can do this. And so now they're starting to experiment and push the envelope even more using platforms like AWS but then using a lot of the folks in the AWS partner network like Lumen who are designing and sort of similarly inspired to deliver on demand and virtualized and dynamic capabilities within the core of our network and then within the services that our network and the ways that our network connects to AWS. All of that experimentation now is possible because a lot of the things you need to do to try out the experiment are things you can get on demand and you can kind of, you can move back, you can learn, you can try new things and you can evolve. Right, absolutely. What are some of the things that you're excited about? Here was this forcing function a couple of years ago. We're coming out of that now, but the world has changed. The future of work as you are so brilliantly articulated has changed permanently. What are you excited about in terms of Lumen and AWS going forward? As we saw a lot of announcements this morning, big focus on data, vision of AWS is really, that flywheel with Adam Slipsky is really, really going. What are you excited about going forward? Yeah, I mean, we've been working with AWS for so long and been critical partners for so long that I think a lot of it is continuation of a lot of the great work we've been doing. We've been investing in our own capabilities around the AWS partner network. We're actually in a fairly unique position. We like to think that we're in that unique position around the future of work where between workers, workloads and the networks that connect them, our fingers are on a lot of those pulse points, right? Our fingers are really at the nexus of a lot of those dynamics and our investment with AWS even puts us even more so in a position to go where a lot of the workloads are being transformed, right? So that's why we're invested in being one of the few network operators that is in the AWS partner network at the advanced tier that have the managed services competency, that have the migration competency and the network competency. You can count on one hand the number of network operators that have actually invested at that level with AWS and there's an even smaller number that is based here in the United States. So I think that investment with AWS, investment in their partner programs and then investment in co-innovation with AWS on things like that MLB use case really puts us in a position to keep on doing these kinds of things within the AWS partner network and that's one of the biggest things we could possibly be excited about. So what does the go to market look like? Is it Lumen goes in, brings in AWS, vice versa, both? Yeah, so being a member of the AWS partner network you have a lot of flexibility. We have a lot of customers that are directly working with AWS, you have a lot of customers that would basically look to us to deliver the solution and buy it all as a complete turnkey capability. So we have customers that do both. We have customers that just look to Lumen for the Lumen adjacent services and then pay a separate bill with AWS. So there's a lot of flexibility in the partner network in terms of what Lumen can deliver as a service. Lumen can deliver as a complete solution and then what parts of it AWS and their platform factors into on an on demand usage basis. And that would all be determined, I imagine, by what the customer really needs in their environments. Yeah, and sort of their own cloud strategy. There's a lot of customers who are all in on AWS and are really trying to driving and innovating and using some of the higher level services inside the AWS platform. And then there are customers who kind of look to AWS as one of a few cloud platforms that they want to work with. The Lumen network is compatible and connected to all of them and our services teams have the ability to go and let customers sort of take on whatever posture, whatever cloud posture they need. But if they are all in on AWS, there's very, not many networks better to be on than Lumen's in order to enable that. With that said, last question for you is if you had a bumper sticker or a billboard, Lumen's rebranded since we last saw you. What would that tagline or that phrase of impact be on that bumper sticker? Yeah, I'd get in a lot of trouble with our marketing team if I didn't give the actual bumper sticker for the company, but we really think of ourselves as the platform for amazing things. The fourth industrial revolution, everything going on in terms of the future of work, in terms of the future of industrial innovation, in terms of all the data that's being gathered. Adam in the keynote this morning really went into a lot of detail on the depth of data and then the mystery of data and how to harness it all and wrangle it all. It requires a lot of networking and a lot of connectivity for us to acquire, analyze and act on all that data. And Lumen's platform for amazing things really helps forge that path forward to that fourth industrial revolution along with great partners like AWS. Outstanding, David, it's been such a pleasure having you back on theCUBE. We'll get you fitted for that five-timers club jacket. Sounds good. I'll be back. Thanks so much for your insights and your time and well done with what you guys are doing at Lumen in AWS. For David's to coach us, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE hopefully all day. This is our first full day of coverage at AWS re-invent of 22. Stick around, we'll be back tomorrow and we know we're going to see you then. Have a great night.