“ My problem is not directly about driving costs out of the business, but rather trying to figure out just what the business is now, and what it will be in the future - at least beyond the marketing headlines . . . “
“ I'll have a crack at answering this ... I think that if you join the dots, the business model for mid-large enterprise is pretty clear: provide connectivity solutions that facilitate and support (1) the migration of enterprise customers to cloud and (2), as a subset of this, edge networking/on-prem private cloud.
AI is driving tremendous growth for the large cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft, Google), but perhaps the greater benefit to these operators is not the sale of AI enterprise products per se, but its role in accelerating the migration of enterprise to the cloud in the first place.
Lumen can support and benefit from this by developing connectivity products that can be provisioned quickly, and which otherwise incorporate similar product characteristics as the Saas and compute services they are purchasing from the cloud providers (pay-as-you-go pricing, rapid scalability and burstability, online provisioning, etc); as well as (for large enterprise) one-stop-shop access to multi-cloud via Exaswitch. If Lumen can do that, then from an end-user perspective you will have something approaching an end-to-end seamless Saas/Naas experience, from connectivity to the cloud service itself. From there, it's not hard to see cloud and connectivity being bundled in together as a joint product pursuant to partnership/master reseller arrangements. If co-branding with AWS/MSFT/Google doesn't drive sales, nothing will.
That kind of proposition would take a little while to ramp up, but if they get it right it would be a very successful initiative. And in terms of edge compute, it's arguable that the cloud providers need something like Lumen to do something like this, for it to really take off. None of them has the metro and last mile fiber assets that Lumen has, and for the next couple of years they'll have their hands full trying to build out more compute capability and deal with the energy issues associated with that. “
“ I think that this is Kate's big idea, and why she's been able to attract Dave Ward and Satish Lakshmanan to the company. “
“ So it's all still mainly about selling circuits, just 21st-century fit-for-purpose ones rather than 20th-century relics.”