Lumen Technologies Partners to Gain from Microsoft Relationship

Lumen Technologies partners will get new opportunities from the company’s strategic relationship with Microsoft.

The partnership brings Microsoft Azure capabilities onto the Lumen platform. Lumen is a certified Microsoft Managed Services Partner for a wide range of software and cloud services. Moreover, it’s a Microsoft Gold Partner.

Garrett Gee is Lumen‘s senior vice president of indirect sales.

Lumen Technologies’ Garrett Gee

“Lumen channel partners can sell our complete portfolio of services, and this relationship with Microsoft will only create new opportunities for how they can better service their customers,” he said. “By bringing Microsoft Azure capabilities onto the Lumen platform, mutual customers will be able to run their Microsoft-based solutions closer to where digital interactions are occurring using the global edge computing services of Lumen. We are also looking to collaborate with Microsoft on future enterprise-sector managed solutions for a wide range of Microsoft software and cloud services to help optimize performance of business workloads and support a customer’s entire workforce, wherever they may reside.”

Future Go-to-Market Efforts

The two companies will collaborate on several future go-to-market efforts to support mutual customers worldwide. Those include:

“Lumen’s strategy is still to maintain control over its software-defined networking core with an inter-platform approach towards edge computing solutions and cloud connectivity, which now includes Microsoft,” Gee said. “Lumen channel partners can offer their customers the deep connectivity options they need for their applications.”

Further solidifying their alliance, Lumen has selected Azure as the preferred public cloud venue for workloads that serve its enterprise customers.

Enterprise customers will benefit from having consistent access management experiences across all Lumen digital services. Lumen will also leverage Azure, Microsoft Power Apps and Microsoft 365 E5 security and compliance for its internal digital transformation.

Microsoft’s Yousef Khalidi

Yousef Khalidi is corporate vice president of Azure for operators at Microsoft.

“By making Microsoft Azure technology available on the Lumen platform, we are giving enterprises access to an environment where they can get the low-latency performance they need for critical applications, with the familiarity of Microsoft services and tools,” he said  “With this collaboration, we are expanding the ways in which businesses can connect Azure to their enterprise networks and are excited about having Lumen as a collaboration partner to expand the number of use cases we can achieve at the edge of the network.”