In this episode of the Wainhouse Live! From the Show Floor video series, Wainhouse Research Senior Analyst, Sean Spradling, is joined by Scott Velting, Vice President of Voice and Unified Communications at Lumen Technologies.
They discuss:
- Lumen’s service-centric approach to the opportunity in the unified communications market
- The recent launch of their Contact Center solution
- Real world examples of how Lumen has helped customers achieve better business outcomes
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Watch the episode here:
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Transcript:
Sean Spradling: Hello, and welcome to Live! From the Show Floor, Enterprise Connect 2023. My name is Sean Spradling. I’m the senior analyst for communications platforms with Wainhouse Research. And I’m joined today by Scott Velting, vice president of voice and unified communications from Lumen Technologies. Scott, how are you?
Scott Velting: Hey, doing great, Sean. Happy to be here. We’re having a great show. So excited.
Sean Spradling: Fantastic. Fantastic. I’ve had the opportunity to live inside the Lumen footprint and obviously cover Lumen for a number of years now. I’ve seen a lot of the evolutions in the market that you’ve driven and that you’ve been a part of, but the last 12 months has been particularly interesting for women. Why don’t you walk us through some of what’s going on?
Scott Velting: Yeah. I’ll tell you, it’s an exciting time at Lumen. We’ve got several changes in leadership, of course, the most prominent of which is Kate Johnson who we’re really excited about. She has come in and really set the tone for how we want to operate as a company going forward. She’s surrounded herself with a lot of great leaders, and they’ve really been visible to the employee base. And they’re really driving a lot of momentum already in her very early days. She’s just over 100 days with the company. But one thing they did is they’ve really set the tone with establishing a very clear vision for the company that we can all rally around as employees.
So who are we as a company? And what is it going to take for us to be successful? They’ve been very transparent about that and about simplifying the strategy. And we’re really focused on, there’s really three key areas that we’ve netted it out to, and the first of which is voice migration. How do we do a better job of our existing customer base, making sure we catch those customers on the right solution for them, and keep them with Lumen and continue to grow those relationships? And then the VPN to SASE migration is another key area for us, as well as how do we do a better job of penetrating the mid-market, which is going to be an important segment of the market for us going forward.
Sean Spradling: Absolutely. And you’ve brought on some new services, too. One of them that I saw recently launched was contact center as a service.
Scott Velting: Yeah.
Sean Spradling: Why don’t you walk us through that and maybe how you see that going? Are they converging with unified communications and your view on that?
Scott Velting: Very good question. Yeah. So first of all, Lumen is a partner-agnostic service provider. So we work with the best-in-class in different areas of the market. And so whether it’s unified communications or contact center as a service, we partner with the best-in-class, and then we make their solutions better by integrating them with our network and all the investments we’ve made in our fiber and our edge technologies, et cetera. But recently, we made an investment in allocating our time and energy with Talkdesk, and we issued a press release the other day on that. And we’re excited about Talkdesk because they’re a very innovative company.
We think they’re going to help us penetrate a segment of the market. We’re seeing great interest actually already in early days with them in the public sector. But they’re a very cloud forward company, cloud-native company. And we like what they bring to the table in terms of a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and generative AI here at the conference. They bring a lot of those capabilities in terms of helping our customers be better engaged with their business customers and with their partners and whatnot. So we’re excited about that relationship. And we think we make the solution better by integrating it with our assets and the Lumen platform. And a lot of new use cases that we’re excited about going after with them.
Sean Spradling: Fantastic. I’m curious, there’s a lot of commoditization going on with some of the platforms that we’ve talked about out there, the communication platforms. There’s a lot of the markets are getting filled up with licenses. We’re dealing with saturation in a number of key markets. Where do you see the greenfield? How do you see Lumen stepping forward? And where’s the big opportunity in unified communications?
Scott Velting: Yeah. And I look at it as the market is still in a huge state of transition, right? There’s still a lot of customers out there with legacy services. We see that in our customer base, and that’s common across the industry. All the service providers are dealing with that challenge. And so number one, we want to make sure we do a good job of helping those customers get from the legacy environment to the cloud. Many of those customers are going to be in a hybrid scenario for a period of time. We think we’re well-positioned to support that. But also just the pace of technological change is really accelerating. And so customers need help thinking through what is the right strategy from a communications as well as just a broader business operations perspective.
They need help thinking through those challenging decisions. And we think we’re well suited for that. So we’ve been investing in our services portfolio to help customers, number one, on the front end with consulting and thinking through the strategic moves that they could make, but then on the implementation side as well. So after we sell a deal, we want to make sure to help customers onboard their end users, do a good job of making sure they’re engaging with the new technology, they know how to use it, so the customer can get the most out of it. And then there’s a managed services component as well for customers that don’t have the ability to support the solutions themselves. We’ve got the managed services skillsets and capabilities, and we’re continuing to invest in those areas to make that even better for our customers.
Sean Spradling: That’s fantastic. It is a full-time job trying to keep up with all the changes going on in communications.
Scott Velting: For sure.
Sean Spradling: Absolutely. And it’s nice that you bring up customers because a lot of times in these conversations about markets and opportunities and technology, we lose track of the customers in all this. I know that you’ve taken a very service-centric approach to the market. Can you give us some stories on how your services have helped customers achieve better results, right? That’s what this is all about.
Scott Velting: Yeah. And I’ll give you a couple of examples actually. One burgeoning area of business for us is with the – it doesn’t get talked about a lot – but the specialty lines or the functional lines business. And that’s for customers that may have legacy devices supporting elevators or alarm systems, point of sale terminals. And those customers are on old technology, older devices, and they want to move those to a more current technology and make sure they have backup capabilities. And so we’re seeing a great business emerge there. We’ve got several large retail customers, actually, that we’ve already helped out where they’ve moved from the legacy of technology. We’ve enabled them with wireless backup capabilities as they’ve done that. And in one instance, the customer did have an outage with their primary service, and the failover happened seamlessly. They didn’t even know about it. They called us Monday morning after the weekend when the failure occurred and just had rave reviews about the service because they didn’t even know it had happened until they got into the office, into the store on Monday morning.
Sean Spradling: That’s how you want that to go.
Scott Velting: Yeah. And then there’s just a lot of customers of different sizes that were helping with the migration experience. We’re spending a lot of calories in terms of dollars and resources to make sure we’ve got the right skill sets and the right tools in place. As customers go through this transition and they start to migrate locations and services to newer technologies, making sure that we do a good job of providing a great experience in terms of not just the people that we have, but also investing in the automation capabilities to make it easier for the customer and easier for our employees, which benefits us in terms of driving cost out of the business. But ultimately, we want to provide a great customer experience. And so we’re very interested in continuing to invest in those areas.
Sean Spradling: So you’re helping them where they are today and also giving them the off-ramp from all that complexity that they have been dealing with for years.
Scott Velting: Exactly. Yeah. Yep.
Sean Spradling: That’s fantastic. Well, my name is Sean Spradling. I’m the senior analyst for communications platforms at Wainhouse Research. I was joined today by Scott Velting, vice president of unified communications and voice at Lumen Technologies. Make sure to stop by their booth or their website to find out about these and other innovations that are going on. Thanks very much. We’ll see you next time.
Author Information
Sean is a Senior Analyst strategically focused on cloud-based collaboration and its impact on worker productivity and human connection. Sean provides research on market sizing and forecasts, product and service evaluations, and end user/buyer insight.
Sean is a trusted advisor to and assists industry vendors and enterprises with workplace communications and collaboration strategies, market entry and product assessment, product portfolio analysis, and sales enablement services.
Prior to Wainhouse, now a part of The Futurum Group, Sean was the Chief Product Officer at PGI, owning the product strategy and roadmap for a full suite of B2B and B2B2C SaaS communications products including an enterprise grade phone system, audio meetings, video meetings, messaging, video webinars, high touch attended audio conferences and massively scaled video webcasts.
Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from University of Colorado, Boulder.
