The new service includes compute, storage, network and security. It leverages the bare metal Edge Compute platform Lumen launched last year and VMware Cloud Foundation and software-defined data center technology, coupled with VMware Cloud Director. Available via Lumen edge computing locations, it’s designed to meet 95% of US enterprise demand within 5 milliseconds of latency. It’s also available on customer premises, 2200 third party data centers in different regions, and via VMware Cloud on AWS. “We can help our customers enhance experiences, enhance application performance, and improve security and control – with speed and at scale by empowering them to deploy workloads closer to digital interactions on pre-built hardware and managed infrastructure,” Chris McReynolds, Lumen’s VP of cloud edge product management, said in a statement. Since it uses pre-built dedicated servers, the service can be up and running in days, Lumen said. Lumen’s cloud, edge and newer Lumen platform offerings are part of the company’s compute and application services business segment. In the second quarter, growth for the enterprise channels within that segment was flat year-over-year. In a conference call, Lumen CEO Jeff Storey said Lumen has “a unique opportunity to grow our enterprise business by leveraging our expansive fiber network to provide essential transport services and further penetrating our on-net buildings, utilizing our edge computing network to move critical workloads closer to the source of data and the use of data and expanding the capabilities of the Lumen platform and enabling greater digital consumption of our services for all of our customers.” He added, “I’m the first to acknowledge that we do not yet see the pace of growth that we expect from these initiatives, but we remain confident in the opportunity and are streamlining our focus and further investing to drive that growth.”
