Wainhouse Senior Analyst Sean Spradling is joined by Dalton Curry, Senior Manager of Global Product Management at Lumen Technologies, to talk about trends in the collaboration space, the products and services they offer, and how Lumen helps customers adopt UC&C technology.
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Transcript:
Sean Spradling: Welcome to Live from the Show Floor at Zoomtopia 2022. My name is Sean Spradling. I’m the senior analyst for communications platforms with Wainhouse Research, and I am joined by Dalton Curry, senior manager for global product management at Lumen. Dalton, great to see you. How’s things been going at the show?
Dalton Curry: It’s been great, Sean. I really enjoyed actually the energy from the showroom floor, the expo. I think it’s been really fantastic so far. It’s great to be back in person.
Sean Spradling: Absolutely. It’s tough to beat 576 megapixels, right?
Dalton Curry: 100%. Face to face is really key.
Sean Spradling: There you go.
Dalton Curry: So it’s good to be back.
Sean Spradling: Well look, I have lived inside the Lumen footprint for years. I’ve, in the previous life, I was a partner of Lumens. Currently, obviously you’re in my coverage space, but there are some out there that are less familiar with Lumen. Why don’t you give us a little bit of an overview of who Lumen is and what they do for their customers?
Dalton Curry: Yeah, thanks Sean. So I actually came from the level three acquisition, and so we were obviously big telecommunications company acquired by CenturyLink. We’ve now kind of morphed, right, rebranded into Lumen Technologies and we’re really focused on having a platform for connected security, cloud networking, obviously our collaboration UC&C product portfolio as well as our voice services.
Sean Spradling: That’s fantastic. So I know that there’s a lot of angles to the relationship between Zoom and Lumen. Why don’t you give the folks some color of all of the pieces of that relationship?
Dalton Curry: Yeah, so our relationship with Zoom I think is really unique from a partner perspective. So we started out as a reseller of Zoom services back in August of 2020. We’ve actually been more of a carrier channel side. So we started connecting in our SIP services. We first launched Zoom meetings with SIP connected audio with Zoom. So we’re having both dial in for toll and toll free riding the Lumen backbone to Zoom’s infrastructure. We now have call out capabilities for Zoom meetings. That’s kind of morphed into Zoom phones. So we’re now a BYOC carrier for Zoom. In that we offer PSN connectivity in a number of different countries, and obviously we have a lot of services on our voice and PSTN where we’re leveraging the Zoom’s cloud platform and connecting that back to their legacy PSTN.
Sean Spradling: Fantastic. Tell me a little bit about the engagement services that you give your customer.
Dalton Curry: That’s a big part of our service portfolio right now and something that we’re looking to evolve. So today, when you’re a Zoom customer of Lumens, we have options for our adoption packages, which will help customers adopt the UC&C technology they just purchased. So that could be tailored coaching. Right. It could be end user guides or videos that are specific to the customer’s use cases or personas. And then we bundle that around with implementation and basically UC&C professional services to help the customer actually implement those specific like Zoom as an example, whatever that UC&C application is, right, we’ll help go in, configure their call queues for them, set up their auto attendant and get their service up and running.
Sean Spradling: Dalton, tell me a little bit more about the trends that you are seeing in both the carrier space and the collaboration space.
Dalton Curry: Yeah, great question Sean. So we’re really tracking two trends at Lumen. The first one is the migration from on premise to cloud. So a lot of customers, right, have legacy aging infrastructure. Right. They may have customers who, let’s say on a Saturday night, right, they’re going and upgrading their server firmware. Right. So for us it’s important to help them migrate to the cloud, make it a seamless experience for them, and obviously have all of the new features and functionality that cloud service providers have that are fully redundant. The second trend that we’re really seeing in the workplace is the hybrid work experience. So obviously with the pandemic and everything, a lot of employees went and set from home, right, where they’re, hey, they’re working out of their living room. Right. Or they’re maybe sharing an office space. And so how do you have a good experience for them when they’re both remote and have that same in-person experience in the office. So leveraging a platform like Zoom actually helps with that.
Sean Spradling: Absolutely. So I’ll ask a little bit deeper of a question in that same space though. What’s holding customers back from migrating to the cloud for their communications, for their calling in particular? We’ve seen a lot of motion over the years there, but where there still seems to be this really stubborn set of customers out there.
Dalton Curry: No. You’re right. And I think part of it is what product fits best for their business. Right. And I think the second thing is from a cost perspective, right, a lot of customers have invested heavily in that infrastructure. Right. I mean, they’ve spent millions of dollars sometimes and having that upkeep, and so we have to make the route easy for them to move, but also cost factoring, in for a total cost of ownership. Right. Make sure that it’s easy to deploy, easy to manage, and at the end of the day, something that they can consume for maybe a, not an CapEx model anymore, but more of an OpEx subscription based model.
Sean Spradling: Perfect. Perfect. One last question. Out of all of the stuff that Zoom has given us today, the industry today, what feature or capability do you think that the Lumen customer base is going to be most excited about?
Dalton Curry: Oh, there was a lot of announcements at the keynote speech. I mean, there are some really good ones. If I had to pick just one, I would say there’s a lot for Zoom IQ and their artificial intelligence. I think from the perspective of a sales manager, right, being able to have a tool that they can leverage to coach their sales people, right, where it’s hey, its immediate feedback, right, they can set up on key metrics or variables, getting a summary afterward of all the action items that you need. Right. I mean, how many of us take notes on calls anymore? Right. I don’t have the time to do it. So having that at my fingertips, right, as a salesperson is great. It’s picking up on keywords as I say them, right? It’s getting my engagement from the customer and being able to have those interactive conversations. And then as a manager, right, I don’t have time to follow up with each of my individual direct reports and listen to every call they have, whereas now I have actionable insights from Zoom IQ.
Sean Spradling: And from a vendor perspective, I would think that being able to tie yourself from the communication stack straight through to the businesses success, those key metrics and sales numbers, that’s critical.
Dalton Curry: Oh, huge. Huge For us.
Sean Spradling: Been looking for that for a long time, haven’t we?
Dalton Curry: Hands down. Yes, we have.
Sean Spradling: That’s awesome. Well, Dalton, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for your time. This has been Live! from the show floor at Zoomtopia 2022.
Author Information
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.
Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from University of Colorado, Boulder.
