Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) and VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced a significant expansion of their partnership to fast-track the design, development, and delivery of edge computing and more secure, work-from-anywhere solutions. Lumen and VMware’s combined capabilities will enable customers to deliver future-forward experiences for any application, to any device, from the global cloud core to the distributed network edge.

Automated factories. Smart cities. Telemedicine. These interaction-intensive experiences require the orchestration of compute, network, and data resources closer to the customer to deliver low latency, and intrinsically secure applications. To lay the foundation for advanced workloads, Lumen and VMware will form a Joint Innovation Lab, bringing together architecture and design, marketing, and sales resources. The teams will focus initial efforts on co-developing solutions for the Lumen portfolio of managed services in key areas including:

• Edge Computing: Certifying the integration of the VMware Tanzu Basic edition with the Lumen Edge Bare Metal service and Lumen Dynamic Connections. This combination will enable businesses to create a more secure software supply chain to rapidly deploy new edge-native workloads, on-demand, closer to the point of digital interaction.
• Work-from-anywhere: Adding VMware’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform – inclusive of VMware SD-WAN and VMware Workspace ONE – to the Lumen solutions set. Many organizations now manage distributed workforces, making legacy solutions – including hub-and-spoke-based VPNs – obsolete. This initiative will help customers more seamlessly adopt SASE architecture to achieve the reliability and performance of a traditional network, as well as deliver superior customer and employee experiences, in a Zero Trust model.
• Security: Integrating VMware Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint and VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload with intelligence data from Black Lotus Labs, the threat research arm of Lumen. Enterprises will be better positioned to defend against cyber-threats, right from the end point, using the combination of security analytics derived from one of the world’s most deeply peered networks and industry-leading endpoint protection and datacenter virtualization.

“Resilient edge computing solutions will drive the next wave of digital innovation for the enterprise and customers need the right capabilities to effectively create, deploy, and manage applications in this new environment,” said Jeff Storey, president and chief executive officer, Lumen Technologies. “This deliberate move to invest in and accelerate our efforts with VMware will allow us to quickly bring to market software-defined solutions that address the real issues our customers face as they move applications to the edge. That is powerful.”

“We see an exploding set of edge use cases that will result in every human experience becoming digital,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “These trends have only been accelerated as a result of the pandemic. Materializing these opportunities requires strong partnership by proven technical leaders. The Lumen-VMware partnership will provide the exact combination required to transform business processes and customer experience.”