Lumen Technologies turned to longtime partner Cisco to beef up its remote work portfolio, teaming with it to roll out a new cloud-based unified communications product.
The offering, dubbed Lumen Solutions for Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCMC), delivers Cisco’s enterprise-grade calling and collaboration services over Lumen’s global fiber network. Features include calling, messaging, Cisco Webex integration, instant messaging, mobile and remote access, collaboration phones and endpoints, network connectivity options and emergency call handling, among others.
Lumen is offering the product with different service levels, including a core option that provides an on-premise-like experience with full control over the environment; a Plus tier with select managed services such as migration assistance; and a fully managed tier which includes migration, operation and management of the environment.
Scott Velting, Lumen’s VP of product management for voice and collaboration solutions, noted in a statement that in light of the pandemic enterprises have “realized that the future of work includes remote and hybrid environments” and as a result are now “investing heavily in cloud solutions that integrate calling, conferencing, file sharing and software applications.”
He continued “Our expanded partnership with Cisco will enable current and future users of Cisco Webex to deploy flexible, agile and efficient collaboration technologies without large capital investments, ongoing maintenance or high IT expenses for staffing and training."
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The move builds on a long-standing partnership between Cisco and Lumen. Last year, Lumen extended the reach of Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Service beyond North America to Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.
Cisco has also teamed with other partners to expand its remote work-oriented SD-WAN and secure access service edge (SASE) offerings. It recently collaborated with Equinix on SD-WAN last month, and this year struck SD-WAN deals with AT&T, Verizon, KDDI Americas, India’s Airtel , Megaport and Google Cloud, among others.