I'll be honest. Five years ago I would have bet against Lumen. CenturyLink in a new hat. Hemorrhaging enterprise customers. The brand carried more baggage than a holiday airport.
Then Kate Johnson took over, said "we're rewriting the story of networking," and backed it up. $8.5 billion in private connectivity contracts in 2024 alone. The Private Connectivity Fabric, fiber with 25% less optical loss and 60% more capacity than competitors, purpose-built for AI workloads. A USDA contract running SD-WAN, zero-trust, edge computing, UC, and contact center across 9,500 federal locations.
That's not a telco play. That's an enterprise technology company that happens to own a lot of fiber. For partners, it's either a massive opportunity or a direct competitor, depending on which side of the deal you're sitting on.
I don't make predictions often, but I'll make one here: Lumen in 2028 won't look anything like Lumen in 2024. And the partners who figure that out early will do very well.