Lumen Picks Blue Planet to Prep Inventory for AI

Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) has chosen intelligent inventory management software from Blue Planet, a division of Ciena (NYSE: CIEN), to enable the carrier to pursue a strategy of delivering enterprise AI networks.

Lumen will specifically deploy Blue Planet Inventory (BPI), an intelligent and automated alternative to legacy operations support systems (OSSs), which haven’t aged well in many telco environments. Many older inventory OSSs are siloed, don’t scale well, and have complex, proprietary interfaces that hinder data retrieval. It should be considered a major win by Ciena and Blue Planet.

One of the major problems that Blue Planet is aiming to solve is to automatically discover what’s out there, locked in OSS inventory systems. BPI enables auto-discovery and visualization of multivendor equipment and services via a cloud-native environment that incorporates a graph database. BPI creates a digital twin of the network's multiple resources for use in troubleshooting and simulations for planning.

BPI can be deployed within a public or private cloud service or as a service from Blue Planet. It competes with—and apparently beat out in this case—OSS inventory products from a range of equipment suppliers, as well as longtime OSS software providers such as Amdocs.

Blue Planet conceptual layout. Source: Blue Planet

Lumen's Taking Control of Inventory

Gaining control of inventory data is what Lumen needs to continue a turnaround effort to consolidate and normalize services across what it acknowledges are four distinct architectures, cobbled together after many years of mergers and acquisitions. The goal is to spur delivery of network-as-a-service (NaaS) offerings while boosting a major effort called Lumen Private Connectivity Fabric.

“A single source of truth for our network inventory and data integrity is core to Lumen’s transformation to create a digitized, AI-ready network, one that can quickly address customer needs driven by the major demand for connectivity fueled by AI,” stated Kye Prigg, EVP Enterprise Operations, Lumen Technologies, in the press release.

Private Connectivity Fabric is Lumen’s answer to enterprise demand for faster, more reliable, and flexible connectivity services required in the AI era. It aims to deliver customized solutions spanning metro and nationwide dark fiber infrastructure, metro and national Ethernet service, intranet and Internet services, and wavelength services. This last offers high-speed connections across an international fiber network that Lumen claims spans 110 countries and 6,000 cities worldwide, with over 60 edge compute nodes in various stages of development. The service also furnishes enterprises connectivity up to 400 Gb/s using Lumen’s nationwide optical network—which is based on in part on Ciena equipment.

Blue Planet’s BPI is key to Private Connectivity Fabric because it will enable Lumen to identify the elements needed to create these customized services for a range of enterprises, including hyperscaler customers.

Lumen Is Betting on Hyperscalers

Indeed, Lumen is counting on those big cloud providers. On August 5, 2024, a day before its second-quarter earnings call, Lumen announced $5 billion in new business specifically related to AI-enabled connectivity for hyperscaler customers. And on the earnings call, CEO Kate Johnson said Lumen foresees $7 billion more in orders from the same customers.

“Lumen has been anointed as the trusted network for AI by some of the most important technology companies on earth with over $5 billion in major partnerships to date and visibility to nearly $7 billion more in opportunities,” said CEO Johnson. “[W]e see the market for Lumen's Private Connectivity Fabric as providing a major positive momentum shift for this company.”

Why Blue Planet Is Essential

Lumen's "momentum shift" is a key reason why CEO Johnson took over at Lumen two years ago. Following its name change from CenturyLink to Lumen, the telco was suffering from overgrowth of networking resources, evidenced in a snarl of inventory that needed to be culled.

Blue Planet’s BPI will be essential to Lumen’s gaining better control of its resources in order to support the hyperscalers and other enterprise customers with Private Connectivity Fabric. And the help doesn’t come a moment too soon.

Lumen announced July 24 that Microsoft will be using Private Connectivity Fabric to interconnect its AI-enabled datacenters. In turn, Lumen will be using Microsoft cloud and AI services to revamp its infrastructure to offer Private Connectivity Fabric. The resulting efficiencies are expected to result in $20 million of additional cash flow over the next 12 months.

Then on August 1, Lumen announced that it’s reserved 10% of fiber manufacturing leader Corning’s global fiber capacity for each of the next two years for use in doubling Lumen’s intercity fiber connections—again, for use in Private Connectivity Services.

Each of these moves underscore Lumen's strategic direction, on which it's counting heavily to achieve a turnaround. Is Lumen betting too big on the hyperscalers' continued demand for AI connectivity? That remains a risk, though Lumen also sees progressive opportunity for Private Connectivity Services to support inferencing. Will all this roll out in time to save Lument's bacon? It's going to be an interesting few quarters for this telco.

Futuriom Take: By choosing Blue Planet Inventory, Lumen is making good use of a leading OSS-alternative platform for gaining control an array of networking silos, boosting the telco’s efforts to serve emerging AI connectivity demands. The selection is also a big win for Ciena and Blue Planet.