Lumen’s Laurinda Pang, president of global customer success, wholesale and international, outlined her company’s growth strategy at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom conference, adding details to a plan articulated earlier this year by Lumen CEO Jeff Storey.
Pang said there are four pillars to Lumen’s revenue growth strategy. The first is expanding into new markets by investing in next-generation services like edge compute, security, and quantum fiber.
Lumen’s second priority is increasing penetration in existing markets, including those that are in decline, such as MPLS. Pang said Lumen wants to manage those businesses as efficiently as possible by transitioning customers to next-generation services and capitalizing on the remaining opportunities for its legacy assets.
“While MPLS is definitely declining, it is not going away any time soon,” Pang said, adding customers with “performance-sensitive applications” often choose to retain some MPLS connections.
Operational excellence is the company’s third pillar, Pang said, explaining that Lumen’s digital transformation will simplify processes for both the company and its customers.
Last but not least, Lumen is focused on recruiting and retaining qualified workers in today’s tight labor market, a task that is becoming “increasingly more difficult for any industry,” Pang said.
Divestiture delayed
Lumen now expects to close the sale of its Latin American business to Stonepeak in early Q3, Pang said. The $2.7 billion deal was originally slated to close during the first half of 2022.
She explained a part of Lumen’s workforce is focused on ensuring a smooth transition, and said after the deal closes, those people will be able to devote energy to Lumen’s digital transformation and process automation.
After the sale closes, Lumen will continue to help its customers get service in Latin America, Pang said. “We retain highly strategic relationships with the buyer,” she said. “We know the people, we know the leadership team who will be staying in place.”
Although Lumen is committed to helping enterprise customers worldwide, the company did disconnect its network in Russia as of March 8, Pang said. She said Lumen doesn’t have consumer customers there, and will continue to support Russian enterprise customers doing business outside that country, as long as they are not sanctioned by the U.S.
T-Mobile partnership
Pang noted there are several facets to Lumen’s relationship with T-Mobile US. “They are customer, supplier, partner,” she said, explaining the edge partnership started in the C suites at both companies and has now made its way to the sales forces. Representatives from both companies approach customers together, Pang said, and have already had some wins in the public sector and with large enterprises.
“Some account directors are more entrepreneurial, and those that have figured out how to leverage that relationship are very successful,” Pang shared. She noted edge is one of the products Lumen incentivizes its sales representatives to prioritize.
Lumen currently connects 2,000 data centers, Pang said, and offers customers "a substantial amount of on ramps to the cloud." This is likely to be important to T-Mobile's growing portfolio of enterprise customers, since unlike its major competitors T-Mobile has not partnered with a public cloud provider.