Ep.162- Tech Stack Mastery: Secrets to Sell across Cloud, Connectivity, and Security with Umesh Lakshman
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus and this is Next Level BizTech.
Everybody welcome back. We got a new track for you here. We’re talking about tech stack mastery, what everybody wants to talk about. Secrets to sell cloud,
connectivity and security really across the whole tech stack. So on with us today, we have got the man with we were talking about this before the most interesting mustache.
Umesh Lakshman, he is the national VP of technology solutions at Lumen. Umesh, welcome on man.
Thank you so much. And yes, I do have a very interesting mustache that now I can never change out of.
No, you can’t. Hope you don’t change and people are gonna listen.
No, I’m just gonna go into the ZZ top version. That’s the other version.
Hey, it worked out for them. They did well. They did well.
Yeah, they did.
Let’s let’s kick this off. Let’s let’s hear a little bit about you. We know your title. We know where you’re at. Everybody knows Lumen. But let’s talk about how did you get into this field? Where did it all start? Is it a windy path? Is it a linear path? Fill us in.
Sure. And first of all, thanks for having me here. This is gonna be a fun conversation for sure, because I know you for a little while now, Josh.
I started out pretty much back in 2000, back in the tech sector. So did my masters here in the US and I just got hired by Cisco at that point in time, which is going through a big boom and joined as what they called an associate SE very entry level SE and quickly but steadily moved to the ranks. But as I moved to the ranks, I also had a lot of exposure to different verticals, which is like now in hindsight, it’s been super helpful for me. I’ve been in large enterprise type accounts, I’ve supported sled, I’ve supported public sector, I’ve supported channels at one point,
hyperscalers for a long period of time as well and cloud providers as well. So it’s given me a very unique perspective into just to what I’m doing today, which is to lead all of the SE community for all of those sectors and in segments to this day, right?
I joined Lumen about four years ago. So it was a big pivot to come in from tech to telco. While the foundational technology is similar, the way we go to market, the way we address our stack is different. And it’s almost like going from a hardware software render to a managed services kind of a conversation. And that was a big pivot for me personally.
Over the years, my claim to fame is I was the youngest Cisco Press author, right? I have three Cisco Press books in under my belt, different life.
I’m a big self professor Renaissance mine, I will try everything at least once. So dabbled with music, there’s tons of headphones behind me. So you can always talk to me about music.
I used to be a frontman for a band at one point, I’ve danced professionally. Onion back, let’s go. Right. So yeah, I used to professionally dance also. And I placed top three in the world at one point in time. And then I retired back in 2018.
I had my own little podcast.
I love to write, I love to read. So try to do everything as much as I can. One thing, at least close, focusing on the audience here, one thing I would really like to get to is get closer, tighter engineering interlock with all the layers of the partner channel, which is advisors, agents, TSDs, partners, whichever way you look at it. And I would like to get a tighter engineering interlock so that we can be truly advised on what would be the best way to move forward.
And personally, it’s like I love personal transformation, professional transformation and organizational transformation. So I feel like I’m in the perfect place at the right time with Looman right now and where are we going?
I love it. One question, and then to this dance. All right, so I’ve got, I’ve got some kids getting into this. They’re in competition. So I’m getting ingratiated in this world, comp season kicks off to Saturday, actually. I understand. But tell us what top top three in the world, what kind of dance? What are we talking about?
So it was salsa dancing. It started out just like any other one of my obsessions, right? It was literally a drop in class that my wife signed me up for. I showed up and I was like, Oh, this is not bad. I’m like, I don’t have two left feet. Great. And, and then it just progressed became an obsession. I joined the dance team.
And then kind of even the same very similar story, right? grow through the ranks. And then I was leading a team at that point. And then I became the VP of a dance company on the side. And that became its own thing. And then one fine day, just literally two, three weeks before world championships, a friend of mine who dances on a different team, she has pinned me and she’s like, Hey, should we do worlds together? And I’m like, sure, we don’t have a song. We don’t have a choreo or nothing. So he literally did this or thanks can mean break ended up and when you have nothing to lose, you have everything to gain.
Yeah, so we were like just taking step by step by step and we’re going through quarters we read, we qualified for the quarter finals and then we went to semis and then, oops, now we’re in the finals top five. And then in 2012, we placed top three in the world we placed third. And then personally, I we had a child like my wife and I, and I took a break from dance for about three to four years. And I had the zitch to go back and do I still have it in me? You know, I’m 40 plus, I’m coming in things that are like half my age.
So I thought I’ll try it out again. I only placed number two. And I was like, all right, at this point, my doctors are telling me I should quit.
So that’s the story there.
I love it. All right. So so then let’s think back here. Before we get into tech stack and a little bit more about Lumen, just one quick, you know, the career at Cisco and anywhere just Lumen hard lesson learned or something that a great mentor taught you carried with you along the way.
Two things comes to mind to me and it’s tied to maybe my journey as well. I think personal and professional growth takes patience, perseverance and grit.
There’s times we’re going to just question yourself and choices, but got to stick the path. And a lot of times it’s just you’re missing one of the other three things I talk about when it comes to growth, which is experience, education and exposure that you need to have at all points. So as a framework, that’s helped me a lot to just keep focused on the long term goal. And it’s okay if we deviate from the normal along the way to get there. The second thing,
one of my first managers, and I commend him for this, he said, manage your perception.
And I said, what does that mean?
And then I was trying to figure out what it is. And it’s necessarily difference between perception and perspective. And it is always manage others perspective, put yourself in others perspective on how they see you. And make sure you manage that it puts you in a much more powerful place in the room.
And you also become, you automatically put your guard down, you become more humble, you’re trying to understand, you become more curious,
you become much more interesting as a human being, because you’re having a meaningful conversation versus I want to get something out of it.
Yeah, I love that. All right. So we got to learn a little bit about lumen here. There is a speaking, we’ll bought a mesh, maybe onion with layers, lumen is also an onion with layers. So I think everybody, everybody that comes out of this space goes back understands there was quest, there’s century length, there was level three, and now we’ve got this big lumen brand. Yeah, but this is not the lumen. This is not your grandma’s lumen of 10 years ago, right? And so I want to talk about advanced solutions here, right? You’ve got the biggest and baddest network, you’ve got some stories and some recent announcements around that. But start us off before we get like, super deep into the product sets and OEMs and things like that, just high level it for us. How is lumen embracing advanced solutions, maybe some color and some depth to that?
Okay, sure. And I know you mentioned three out of maybe many different pieces of lumen, you mentioned quests, you mentioned century length, you mentioned level three, but we’ve done a ton of acquisitions over the years to be market relevant
in what I would call a network adjacencies, which is aka advanced solutions, to bolster up that portfolio. And then the way I define network adjacencies is one hop away from network. So when you think security, when you think cloud and edge or anything wise or collaboration, or even managed services as a wrapper, all of them are network adjacent to the way I think of it. And we have done a ton of investments and a ton of partnerships in that space, to basically have a broad portfolio.
When you talk of differentiation, there’s maybe three things I can think of. One is the breadth of the portfolio, and what we can do to where you’re at as a company today, thanks to a strong leadership plus a vision, where we’re beginning to re innovate again and re transform again. So we’re beginning to invest back into what we call innovation.
And not just the breadth, but the strength of the portfolio, when you really start looking at not just width, but also depth within each of those pieces, you mentioned OEMs, there’s almost a menu card per se of things you can do with each of those.
I’ll take for example, security at a very high level, right? When we break down security, you think of network and application security, you think of threat discovery, you think of like security strategy and planning, professional services, there’s so many pieces to it. But every one of those that I just spoke about has an associated like portfolio piece that we can address. And of course, when I say network, maybe the first thing I should have started network plus security is SASE and SSE that as well. Yeah. So I’m just taking one piece of maybe one of the different pieces of the puzzle as we structure our portfolio. But there’s all three pieces are spread, there’s depth, but there’s also a huge lens of innovation as well.
Yeah, and I will unpack that here in just a sec, because I think that’s what’s really blown people’s minds when we get a chance to go a little deeper in the conversation about what Lumen does and where Lumen can help, right? They might, they might think I only know them for this. And I think you start to get into that exposure of a little bit deeper in one of those stacks, it’s and we have this and we have this and we have this. So you’ve really turned in from this known and grown in the network space to this MSP that happens to have one of the world’s largest networks as well. So exactly. I love that. We’ll unpack that here. So I need to, I need to cross selling pro tip here. So the title of this episode is, you know, tech stack mastery. So we have partners that the customer needs them for a thing, they get brought in for a thing. And then the mission is, how do we make sure that they know that our advisors can help them with everything? So from your perspective, you’ve seen a lot of deals, seen a lot of engagements, if I start with cloud, and I moved to security, or I start with network, and I moved to cloud, whatever.
How do you how do you want advisors to position you? And what is that secret in that those steps in that conversation?
Yeah, so you said cloud to security, let’s say, whenever you think of cloud, my first question is, is there a cloud religion, which is have you picked a cloud in the first place? And for what reasons? And where are you in that journey? Right? It’s it’s a continuum. It’s not even a journey. It’s a continuum.
Because I feel like we’re in a phase today in the industry where people across the enterprise, everybody ran to cloud. And now people are like, maybe not, not anymore. So they’re thinking of actually getting back into on prem into private data centers now. So it’s almost like a face to that old run to cloud that’s happening right now. But if you take a cloud migration, typical things are here, refactoring, rehosting, sass, re platforming, any of those buzzwords that you think of, there’s a lumen cloud service that’s associated with it from a management professional services angle, right? I say if you want to connect to a cloud, or if you wanted to migrate to a cloud, there is a plethora of services in our stack that lets us do that, right? But then,
to me, security is almost like an underpinning that goes across the board. It’s it’s if I wouldn’t call it out as a separate box piece here, it’s more like a foundational piece. So when you think of a cloud or migrating to the cloud,
to me personally, I feel there’s a set of security profiles and postures that we’re trying to like meet at all points in time, that’s minimum viable for the entire enterprise.
And be it cloud or on prem or wherever the data needs to live, these things have to be applied across the board. So cloud plus security is almost like an integral conversation is you kind of almost start with security, then go into the cloud, and then define the ecosystem around it.
Network to cloud is the easiest transition to me because at some point in time, I mean, everybody, I’m guessing at some point in time, I sold a lumen network or lumen circuit.
But then you also have been in a meeting where you say we want to optimize the network.
First question is why?
Right? We want the right capacity in the right places. Okay, great. What are you trying to do? Where’s the growth pattern? And sooner or later, you’re starting to talk about, oh, we want cloud connectivity in pod A, pod B, locations A, location B, because that’s where our SaaS is. These are our big branches. So network is no longer just network.
It’s a connectivity ecosystem that’s almost endpoint agnostic. And to me, endpoint could be a cloud bubble in each of those networks.
Alright, let’s go deeper back into the products and services here. So yeah, I’m thinking product soup, OEM soup. So I’m just gonna throw out a whole bunch of stuff. I’m gonna miss a bunch of stuff. And you’re gonna tell me, hey, here’s where we fit. Here’s what some of the OEMs are.
You know, most importantly, I want people to know when they need help with an OEM or with a product. You know, I know, I know OEMs aren’t everything, right? Sometimes people know what they want. Yeah, think about this. Let’s talk some of the security OEMs. Let’s talk some of the cloud bucket of when you talked about that migration, that management that help. You’ve got the other stuff. You’ve got the NAS product that you guys have that I think is revolutionary, right? Putting in control center portal what people have access to. Just talk about that a little bit those three buckets, maybe pick a product, pick an OEM, and let’s just go deeper in a couple of these for a little bit.
Okay, sure. And maybe at a macro level, the five buckets we look at, and we build our portfolio, we talk to clients is connectivity, which is a K network, security, of course, which is not underpinning. I mentioned agent cloud
collaboration, aka voice as well inclusive, and the wrapper, which is managing professional services that kind of puts it all together into like we could run your estate kind of an angle. From a deck work standpoint,
going back to the OSI model, right?
Like if you were to go from layer zero all the way up to layer seven, be it fiber at layer one, be it ethernet at layer two, IP VPN, layer two, layer three, layer three IP, all flavors of DIA, broadband, everything inclusive, EOS,
inclusive, right? LT backup, all of that inclusive.
And then now you’re going to need layer four, then you’re starting to draw the line between what I would call the network stack into the application stack, and what we can do there. I just laid out maybe half of our network portfolio, right? All flavors of those network portfolio, depending on how we want to consume it.
From a security lens, we think of our network as an integral part of that security because we have the deepest fiber networks in the world, and one of the deeper spirit networks in the world.
So with Blackwater’s Labs running on top of that, what we have effectively done is taken every endpoint, every port, and made it a sensor. And what that gives us is visibility into pretty much 80 plus percent of traffic that’s going on in the internet today, that lets us provide a level of analytics and security and level of services that we can layer on top. That is very unique. Yeah, so our DDoS service takes a lot of threat feeds that coming in from Blackwater’s Labs for security. If you’d had a managed firewall, and I’m shifting to the bigger box of managed services,
a lot of the threat feeds coming into the managed firewall are coming from that same service from Blackwater’s Labs.
Getting higher into the application stack, be it web application, firewall, stable, firewall, stateless,
or if you wanted to get all the way down to the presentation layer and get into that level of security as well. We have different things that we can start service chaining, because they’re all like SAS functions that we can easily deliver on the fly through our edge network.
While you’re right there, before you go out of security, you want to call out,
as you think about DDoS, and as you think about firewall OEMs that are resonating well that you’re seeing success with ones that you want people to think of you when they hear these maybe maybe help us walk us as you go through each one of those layers.
Sure. So the common ones we partner with are Cisco, Fortinet,
Palo Alto.
I’m missing somebody, I feel like I am missing somebody.
But those three would constitute a predominant portion of it. And depending on which way you look at lens, and which part of the market look at Cisco, Meraki is a big piece of it as well, right? There’s there’s, there’s down and up market kind of discussions that you say like mid markets versus large enterprise. And maybe even in retail, you see a lot of Meraki type customers who use Meraki stacks, because they come in very inbuilt with the with the plan to be managed at scale, with very low touch, right with very less IT overload. So that’s a hands handful of OEMs. If you talk about just SASE as a whole, let’s just broaden the lens and talk SASE, right? SASE as a whole has so many functions to it. So you could have CASB in there, you could have zero trust. So we have AppGate in there, you might have threat x in there for web application firewall, you might have working with Netscope now. So CASB and Netscope, that’s new.
That’s a hot one right now. Yeah.
Yeah. So, so we’ve started adding just to give you a quick lens,
things that we did not happen or have in our repertoire historically, like as part of CASB, which was more of an integrated solution, to be like, hey, it has to be all 14 and all this all that, to say, you know, pick your little design of choice, you might already have two or three pieces of puzzle that you’re built and embedded in your ecosystem today. And you’re if you’re interested to add Netscope as the CASB into the ecosystem, we can let you do that.
And do you want people to think of you as, hey, it always has to be a net new in those buckets? Or hey, if the customer has this, Lumen can come in and take over management of these, you have a take either way on that?
The three models, I think I generally see customer comes to us as a very defined problem set and said, I want you to do this and that’s it, right? So which is you literally build something and give it to them, they manage, they do whatever they want. Two is kind of a co manage model, we will, we’ll kind of share parts of the ITS state, we will manage portions of it, we provide you the visibility into what we’re managing, and they integrate it into their larger toolset. Now, the third one is the full IT estate is like, we will manage everything for you, we will be that single easy button, per se, where we will manage your entire IT stack, IoT, OT, IT, all of it. And it’s just this one ecosystem that you can do.
So I would say personally, it’s all dependent on what the customer is looking for. We try to put the customer in the center of most of our conversations and like, it’s their interest to own what is priority.
I always tell when I talk to CIOs or CTOs, I ask them, what are your top five priorities? Great, these are your top five priorities. But almost always, they have had to like set aside five more. But they would love to get it into the five. And I’m like, if we cannot attack these five, what is the next five? And there’s a lot of those in the next five, that you can open up net new doors, avenues as work streams, and build trust, especially with a new customer to have a quick win to cement your brand, and then go in and start starting the second tier of the top five.
Yeah, I love that. I think what I want people to get out of this is there’s a lot of web services, we don’t know what people’s needs are, who they might be buying things through, are they buying it through a disti? Are they buying it through a VAR? You know, and that that’s always for years, those channels were separate. And now those are converged, because, you know, people like yourself, give our advisors the ability to do just about anything. And they’re, you know, the end goal is to, to make this customer as sticky to our advisors as possible. So I’d love the enablement there.
Think about think about NAS for a second. Yeah, you guys have this great product. I’ll set the stage a little bit, then you can kind of fill in the color. So for any of it isn’t no, you know, Lumen has grown up has a great control center software, customers can go in, they can admin, they can poke around, they can see bills, but then this whole NAS thing comes along and Lumen says, hey, you know what, why don’t we make it really easy for people to, to add on services that they’re going to need anyway. So if they have the right equipment, if it’s on net, they now in control center, you can buy a lot of stuff through NAS. So maybe walk us through what what’s there.
Yeah, so it’s a great segue into the way we’re thinking of how to go to market differently.
We’ve, we’ve almost kind of had a pause and reflect moment maybe about 12 months ago to say, the network is our crown jewel.
What and instead of thinking of that as a bad word, how do you actually maximize the network?
And the assets we have.
So about 12 months ago, when we started out on this NAS journey, and NAS is network as a service, we wanted to create a elastic consumption model for clients. And the intent was you buy a port and a service, the port and a service could be NAS, and it lets you go to control center, like you say, and either burst up to a certain level or burst down to the minimum and pay as you use.
And we’re initially it was like new for a lot of people are like, what is this NAS thing? I don’t see it use because a predominant person of our customers are used to having a hard coded 10 gig, full bandwidth. I don’t know how much I’m using, but I’m going to pay for it. And then now suddenly, we’re giving them this flexibility. And they’re like, okay, so I can pay only for five gig. You use it? Yeah, you pay only for five gig if you use it. Right? That’s your new watermark that you’re going to draw it in. And it started to start build more and more and more momentum on how do we digitize on the back end, more services. So that again, you go back to the port and service model. But I’m going to kind of carbonate both of us and say, remember, good old service chaining, right? Is how do we service chain multiple services, so that all you’re going to is going to a portal. And it could be a lumen portal, it could be a partner portal to be any portal. And through an API connection within the two, you go in there and say, I want this port, it’s on that I want to sassy service. And I want 24 seven managed with four clicks, and hit enter. And it’s ready in five minutes. Right? And it completely changes the landscape of how you consume telecom.
It’s almost like making it it’s it’s the easiest way to say it is like it’s like going down to the elastic, you know, days where we would talk about compute and CPUs and like where I could pay for cycles for usage in time. Same thing, we’re now taking the network and making it consumable in bite sized chunks. But with that lens, it’s now started making us think about simplicity into the ecosystem. So that we build a portfolio sitting behind it.
Want to talk for a second about is there anything that we missed from the cloud side of things you guys do a lot with regard to meeting people where they’re at on their journey with regard to cloud want to talk about what what partners can can get engaged on on that?
Yeah, sure, sure. I would say, a lot of times, maybe it’ll shape the conversation I hear start there, which is we want to start moving to the cloud, or we are at the cloud, or we’re coming back from the cloud. So it’s one of those three boxes that’s usually happening. And that to us translates to what kind of cloud connectivity do you have?
Like, do we need to bolster the connectivity over a period of time, by the way, NASA falls in there, too, it gives them that elastic connectivity to the cloud.
And how do we sit down and look at your application estate and see what needs to live in the cloud needs to live on prem. And then we’re talking about things like edge bare metal. We’re talking about maybe even a private cloud offering,
maybe even a storage offering in some cases. So with the 50 US nodes we have around edge, it gives us, I think, terrestrial access to about 97% of us, right, as the fore edge. And with that, what lets us do is some very interesting things we have customers that are coming to us are working on like content, content delivery, for example, it’s almost like they’re building their own middleware for content delivery. And they’re now creating a distributed hierarchical edge node ecosystem. And they’re just streaming it with us. So it opens up net new ways to look at not just the assets from a compute private cloud or storage, but also management of that whole ecosystem, because we can manage all of that, along with the cloud connectivity, plus your network as well. It doesn’t have to be all separate entities.
And experts throughout that journey that understand, you know, besides the private cloud, that if somebody’s got an Azure footprint, an AWS footprint, there’s plenty of expertise in there.
Yeah, and I didn’t get into any one of those, because I almost think about it as cloud neutral. Yeah, you pick a cloud, we have a practice team for it. Right. And we have a practice team that will go across clouds too, because we do have clients who come to us and saying, I had this month, my DevOps team migrate to GCP. I had a lot of my enterprise sitting in Azure. I need to now refactor, rehost some of this content here back in here, or take something out of GCP and put it into my private cloud. That is a realistic ecosystem that we live in the middle of day in and day out.
So if we now let’s let’s put all this together. So let’s think about an example, right? We’re back to talked a lot about the tech stack, right? I think what you gave us some tips in the beginning of how to navigate that tech stack across. We’ve helped uncover a lot of products where you can answer any of these questions. So walk us through an example, then where you were brought in, what was the customer tech stack? What was the business problem? And then what kind of products and things that you put in there after and how did that change things?
So I will merge a couple,
just because I wanted the advisors to hear this.
The common thing that we get or the shape of what the question we get is we need more network capacity.
Okay, great. Awesome. Option A, I will tell you more network capacity. Option B, I will ask you why.
Right? If you go down the Y path, it’s literally like seven different forks it can go into. Because a lot of times, you’re going down the path of opening up a gateway into, oh, we’re having application issues for XYZ application, we’re having latency issues,
we’re having optimization issues. Suddenly, you’re talking at a very different level than just a pipe and a circuit.
Two, my new security policy is making me do data transfers in a different route than we used to before. I’m now having to like do this all over again. Great. Option B, now you just hit security. Option C, oh, we just moved a bunch of stuff to AWS or Azure, pick a cloud of choice. I need a bigger pipe to go do that.
You’re suddenly getting cloud relevant again. So I’m giving you three different forks.
And any one of those forks based on all the answers I just gave you, could lead you to a pathway where you’re no longer being the trusted advisor for just network.
You’re now talking to a CSO, potentially, you’re most likely talking to a CTO across all of them. Right? You’re most likely talking to the VP of cloud as well to do this. And oh, by the way, you’re also looking at it from overall IT stack now. So there’s an opportunity for you to position managed services in different areas that again, kind of going by those tier two priorities. Let’s say they hit some tier two priorities with some managed services and reduce your friction to onboard some of these technologies.
And you can apply to real world examples. We’ll have, and I’ll totally shift gears away from network security. We had a customer came in, their UCCX was having all sorts of issues in terms of getting just some of the data and the analytics they wanted. We went in there and we were like, what’s really the foundational problem was that they had disparate stacks that are trying to work together. And it was just a lot easier for us to position a single or unified stack. And we went to zoom as a stack. Yeah. And we’re like, Okay, we will give you the collaboration stack, we’ll give you everything you’re looking for from an analytics standard standpoint, we’ll do the day zero through true, we will manage it for you as well. And we’ll build you the playbooks if you want to manage it yourself, if you want to co manage it yourself. So started out as a totally different problem, ended up as this massive undertaking we went with them. And we would have never gotten there if you’d got in pigeonhole to, this is the problem. And this is what I want you to solve. Versus us going in and saying, Okay, let’s start peeling the layers of onion. Apparently the onion is the theme of the whole thing.
So it works though, it works. I love it. It seems to me that the theme of this and this kind of rolls into my one of my last questions is, so lumen’s got a lot to offer. You know, the advice for partners, what’s the right question to probe across that tech stack? I mean, clearly questions is, is the secret to these, but what’s your favorite? You know, the advisors are listening, they want to learn, they want to take what they’ve learned, and then go apply it. What’s the question or the question set that pushes that to the next step?
Yeah, I would say I briefly touched on it, which is, there’s a curiosity associated with that first conversation.
And when this is another thing, one of my old mentors told me, he was like, always ask one more question than you’re comfortable asking. Ooh.
Right. It’s like when you feel like you asked too many, just ask one more.
And you’d be amazed at how many things we have uncovered in in conversations. I’ll give you another example, which is this is a retail, large retail customer that came in again with a network problem. We walked in there, I was called to the meeting and I said, what are we trying to solve?
First question, what are we trying to solve? It’s like, that’s easy to solve. What is the bigger thing we’re trying to solve?
And they were like, well, we’re having latency issues between point of sale, and some of these sites with the server that’s sitting somewhere in the cloud that’s also backed up here on the air. Okay, great. I just drew up a diagram in my head. And I’m like, can you draw this out? Like, can we whiteboard this? Right. And low and behold, an hour in, we’re walking in with three different work streams. One focused on how do we do somewhere edge compute with you? Right? How to how do you bolster your cloud connections?
Three, is there managed services engagement around the whole point of sale application stack?
So we could have gone in and easily done, hey,
yeah, this is the problem set. But the key is having the curiosity to go in and ask a 234 questions that might not seem related sometimes.
But at least in your head, you’re connecting those dots.
Right. And then you’re getting a broader lens into all the problems they’re trying to solve.
I love it. Ask one more question than you’re more comfortable with. That’s awesome advice.
All right, final thought, wrap this up. So we got a lot of innovation. We’re talking about AI right before this, we were on a great AI discovery call.
The next couple years, what’s, what’s the innovation you’re most excited about? This can be what’s coming, what’s cooking at Lumen? What’s coming in the market? Just your perspective.
I’ll tell you things that personally, I’m interested in is AI, of course.
But I think it is going to change the human machine interface completely.
And, and I already see it, my glasses with AI, everything has an AI button. And I mean, every one of our apps that we run has this, hey, look, star AI.
And then it is coming everywhere. But I almost feel that second next generation interface is going to be a lot more visual, a lot more auditory,
and a lot more spoken speech than me sitting and typing on my mechanical keyboard, which I will miss heavily because I like the ASMR of mechanical keyboards.
Right. But I definitely think that whole human machine interface is going to evolve the most.
And I think that’ll open up a whole new set of things.
Personally, number two is gaming.
As a gamer, I’m like, as of last year, when they released at CES trade 24, I believe, they released Thunderbolt 5 for gamers. And now I can get a laptop with a Thunderbolt 5 interface, which is 80 to 120 gigs of video on a USB-C. So I can’t even imagine I’m saying that right now, because I still remember floppy disks and all those things running around and how much was like, oh my god, I have so much space.
Yeah. So speeds and feeds and what it’s going to do. Now you tie that to where AI is going and more and more compute going into the interface itself. I think it’s going to change that whole human machine interface completely, which will be super cool.
At Lumen, I think I mentioned a couple of things. One,
in the next 12 to 24 months, you’re going to see a level of investment into our network that’s unforeseen.
And it is not investment on scale alone. It’s about investment on orchestration as well. Because going back to one of my answers before, I’m truly trying to create a digital interface to consume product. You cannot do that unless orchestration is from the ground.
The other thing we truly want to do is almost be the cloud connectivity choice across the board and be an intercloud, intracloud, whichever way you want to look at it, provider at scale. We’re already doing that for a lot of the hyperscalers, building some of the biggest bagmas for them and then laying fiber across the country. But I think we’ll take that into the enterprise very soon. As enterprises start embracing AI and becoming more AI proficient, I would think right now AI is a tool. It’s sitting as disparate tools, but as AI becomes more of a part of the strategy to skill, reskill, culture, all of that. And I think my skills will completely change in five years. What I’ll need to know, compared to what actually my skills have completely changed in the last two years, I’ve become more efficient at prompt engineering than actual engineering. Thanks to all the things that’s out there. But I think again, I think the evolution of the whole ecosystem will be kind of going back to curiosity. Can you ask good questions to get the right answer? Can you actually create clarity in your prompts to get the right output? Because all of that is almost going to be opaque sitting behind the AI umbrella. And it’s just happened. And everything’s just a prompt away.
I love it.
And yeah, if you haven’t read it yet, and you are a gamer nerd, I know, the Nvidia Way is a great book. Yeah, Jensen’s story to go from where this all started to where it’s at now, right? And we grew up having to run games in DOS just to get him to run. Now, I probably got four Nvidia 2080 3080s in different machines throughout. Yeah, it’s just, it’s wild to see that transformation.
Yeah. And I just picked up a razor 18 last year, which is got one of those thunderbolts on it. And he’s just insane, right? My kids playing on it. And I’m like,
yeah, I mean, I can’t even I still remember Doom and Duke Nukem with all the pixelated stuff on Stein. And it was so bad. But we thought it was amazing.
Absolutely amazing.
Right? Yeah. And now I’m like, well, what is going on? Right? Just the level of clarity and the graphics that’s coming out.
I have a question to go is, is that animated? Or is that real? Like you can almost not tell we’re almost there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, kind of goes back to the human machine interface. I feel sooner or later, there will be no need for a screen. It’ll be something as light as this roomless grass that I just put on. And it’ll be here in my retina direct.
That’s where we wrap it the Renaissance man. All right, a mesh. A lot of good nuggets in there. I know we could probably keep going for a while on this. But hey, I appreciate you coming on. Thank you. A lot of good tech stack mastery, a lot of knowledge drop. Hopefully we helped everybody understand the onion we peeled back we’re at the center of the almost at the center of the lumen onion. So yeah, we’re coming on, man.
Thank you. Appreciate it. And thanks for everybody listening.
Love it. Love it. Well, everybody that wraps up for today. As always, remember, these episodes drop every Wednesday. So wherever you’re coming to us from Spotify, Apple Music, tune in and grab those. This has been tech stack mastery secrets to sell across cloud connectivity and security. Umesh Lakshman, national VP of technology solutions at lumen. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Next level tech has been a production of Telarus Studio 2019. Please visit Telarus.com for more information.