In order to accelerate the use of edge computing, remote work and security capabilities, Lumen and VMware are forming a Joint Innovation Lab.
The Joint Innovation Lab stitches together the two companies' architecture and design, marketing and sales resources in order to help customers adopt new services and applications across growth areas such as automated factories, smart cities and telemedicine.
The Joint Innovation Lab isn’t a physical location, but rather a hybrid program that combines elements of software innovation with representations of Lumen’s physical network locations, according to a Lumen spokesperson. The Joint Innovation Lab, which is virtual for now, will leverage existing labs at Lumen and VMware.
In the third-quarter, Lumen opened the doors on its cloud edge experience center in Denver. The center allows customers, partners, and vendors to remotely deploy edge compute technologies on Lumen's platform and test them with live networking under real-life conditions.
Lumen and VMware have a long history of working together including VMware playing an orchestration role in Lumen's edge compute platform.
Lumen has added VMware's VeloCloud solution to its SD-WAN stable, and it announced last year the addition of VMware's SASE solution, both of which are virtualized. VMware's VeloCloud technologies will be deployed as virtual instances across Lumen's edge compute nodes going forward and across a range of public cloud infrastructures as well.
For edge computing, the lab will include the integration of VMware's Kubernetes-based Tanzu Basic edition with Lumen's edge-based bare metal service and its Dynamic Connections offering. Lumen partnered with VMware to make the latter's Tanzu platform interoperable with its edge compute nodes.
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With VMware, customers can plug their virtual machines directly into Lumen to drive them over multi-cloud infrastructures.
Lumen, announced the launch of its Lumen Edge Compute platform in December. With the service, organizations can deploy applications and workloads at the cloud edge via the bare metal-as-a-service on the Lumen platform.
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Lumen has laid claim to being able to reach 98% of the enterprises in the U.S., Europe and some Latin American countries with a low latency of 5 milliseconds one way with its edge compute nodes.
On the security front, Lumen is integrating VMware Carbon Black Endpoint and VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload with intelligence data from Lumen's Black Lotus Labs, which is the threat research arm of Lumen.
"Resilient edge computing solutions will drive the next wave of digital innovation for the enterprise and customers need the right capabilities to effectively create, deploy, and manage applications in this new environment," said Lumen CEO and President Jeff Storey, in a statement. "This deliberate move to invest in and accelerate our efforts with VMware will allow us to quickly bring to market software-defined solutions that address the real issues our customers face as they move applications to the edge."