Lumen and OneVizion are joining forces to revolutionize the future of telecom infrastructure! In this exciting interview John Patton, Founder and Chairman of OneVizion and Kye Prigg, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Operations for Lumen break down a deal that will transform how Lumen manages its large-scale projects across the U.S. With a goal to double their network size, Lumen is taking on some of the biggest network expansion projects worldwide.
By partnering with OneVizion, Lumen gains cutting-edge tools to manage real-time progress, mitigate risks, and ensure seamless collaboration across teams. This game-changing platform will ultimately integrate across Lumen's operations, enabling more efficient deployments and laying the foundation for the future of AI-driven networks.
Don’t miss this behind-the-scenes look at how two industry leaders are paving the way for a connected world!
Steve Saunders:
You guys have done a big deal. That's exciting. Kye, tell us what's going on.
Kye Prigg:
Yeah, thanks, Steve. Yeah, we are very excited about the deal that we've just signed with John and the OneVizion team. And so the deal is really about giving Lumen some, I would say, very, very advanced capabilities when it comes to controlling construction projects on a very, very large scale. As you've heard, Lumen has signed some very, very big deals recently that have been announced, and we have a need to partner with someone that's going to help us to deliver those effectively.
Steve Saunders:
Fantastic. John, what are you getting out of this deal other than a very, very large customer?
John Patton:
Well, sure. Lumen is a very large customer, but one of the hallmarks of what we do is that we always coordinate what's important. And for every one of our customers, all starting points are different. So in the Lumen project, what we're doing is we're coordinating a massive fiber bill that's over a thousand miles long. That's more money and more scope than most companies ever see out there. And so we are taking our software and managing that, and we're learning from that to basically apply it to other large fiber network applications.
Steve Saunders:
Fantastic, John. Kye, can you share a little bit of the detail about this? What specific technologies or platforms that Lumen is using are being integrated or supported with the OneVizion solution?
Kye Prigg:
Yeah, of course. So we are embarking on a multi-year program of work, and we've recently announced $5 billion of deals where we are effectively embarking on a doubling of the size of the network as we know it here in the United States. And so working with OneVizion is going to be very, very important for us. We have to be able to handle thousands of activities in parallel all across the country, coast to coast, north to south.
And so the system that we're working on with the OneVizion team is really going to be foundational for us as we move forward. It enables us to track control and understand our risk on a go-forward basis so that we can effectively control everything that's going on in the field as we build these highly advanced connectivity solutions for our customers.
Steve Saunders:
Is it all fiber?
Kye Prigg:
It is all fiber. So the product that we're delivering is private connectivity fabric. It comes in different flavors, but it is essentially extremely high-capacity, low-latency fiber connectivity between multiple data centers. It will enable the AI economy to thrive by providing very, very scalable connectivity between enterprises, between hyperscalers, and between companies that are running these AI workloads.
Steve Saunders:
What's the benefit for Lumen of this integration in terms of, I mean, it's an OpEx benefit, it's a CapEx benefit? What do you get out of it specifically?
Kye Prigg:
Yeah. So I think the initial benefit to us is that, as I said, this is a foundational system. This is really enabling total command and control over billions of dollars of deployments that are happening across the country in real-time. And so we need to be able to understand on a day-to-day basis exactly where we are on every one of these deployments. Where are our crews? What progress are we making?
But also importantly, we need to have the binoculars out to understand what's coming down the line. Three months, six months, nine months out, what risks are there? What do we see in terms of risks around permits? Risks around designs? What are the bottlenecks that are coming up in such a large deployment? And so OneVizion really gives us that visibility into what's going on and what's coming up.
And so it's really all about efficiency. It's all about understanding exactly where you are in the process. And of course, being able to communicate that effectively to our customers so that they understand where each and every one of their projects is on a day-to basis. And so that's really what we're building here with the OneVizion team.
Steve Saunders:
John, tell us a little bit about this product. Bring it to life for us. What is it actually, and how are you performing this magic of integrating all of this information?
John Patton:
Well, we call it a platform, and it basically at the very foundation runs against the most mature adopted database, which we call Oracle. And it's written against the bulletproof language, Java. And we've been working on this for quite extensive a hundred thousand hours. And then we subdivided the process to managing both site-based and linear assets into what we call data process and tasks. And the data is a challenging part because we've seen literally organizations with hundreds of databases, so how do you consolidate those to pull the efficiencies?
And so we had to invent a different type of technology called the Linked Record Architecture that solves those problems. It's proven. It's been deployed on billions of dollars worth of projects over the last 10-plus years.
Steve Saunders:
That makes a lot of sense. And I know that what you're describing has been a real challenge for a lot of telcos, ISPs, service providers, even hyperscalers. In fact, some of them have been managing a lot of this information in Excel spreadsheets up until now. Kye, it all sounds really exciting. I mean, is this a big shift for you as a company? Are you moving to a completely different model now with this architecture?
Kye Prigg:
Yes, we are. So if you think about the programs that we're just about to embark on, these are some of the biggest projects that are ongoing in telecom worldwide. As I said earlier, we are literally doubling the route miles in our network. We are connecting hundreds of data centers across the country and enabling enterprises to connect into those data centers. And so, we had a need to foundationally change how we do business.
And so what we decided to do was to create a new division here in Lumen enterprise operations, which we call Custom Networks. Custom Networks has brand new processes, brand new ways of working, all of it based around the OneVizion platform and the ultimate visibility that platform gives us in real-time into exactly how we're performing across the country.
Our plan is once this is implemented into Custom Networks, it's used effectively, it's integrated into all of our tools and systems we will then roll this out to the wider enterprise operations teams, which are thousands of other people across the country who are delivering to our customers. And so the plan is to start with custom networks, bed the product in there, the tool sets, the ways of working, the processes, and then roll it out. So it will ultimately foundationally change how we actually deliver for all of our customers.
Steve Saunders:
Wow. And I mean, this is at scale already, but you are describing something which is going to be used across the entire organization at some point.
Kye Prigg:
Yeah. Ultimately, the 9,000 people that we have here in Lumen operations will use this system on a day-to-day basis, as well as the thousands of partners that we have that we partner with across the country to deliver our products and services. Everyone will use this platform eventually,
Steve Saunders:
And Lumen is a $20 billion company or something. That's an extraordinary level of scale. John, you must be delighted. Beer's on you next time I see you.
John Patton:
Steve, yeah, beer's on us. So in order to take on a project as large as the Lumen opportunity takes two teams working in sync, and they have to be experienced teams. The problems are well established. They're basically being processed in unprecedented rates, and our architecture is allowing problems to be solved in months rather than years and years and years, which is what we've seen in other endeavors in our industry.
Steve Saunders:
Wow. This is really exciting. Kye, John, thanks for joining me today.
Kye Prigg:
Thanks, John. Thanks, Steve. It's been a pleasure.
John Patton:
Yeah. And Steve, thank you for hosting this interview.