It wasn’t so long ago that the Covid-19 pandemic sent many corporate enterprises reeling with panic and indecision about issues like how to ensure worker safety and how to operate suddenly very dispersed organizations.
Shaun Andrews, executive vice president and CMO of Lumen Technologies, speaking at this week’s UBS TMT Virtual Conference, described this period for enterprise CIOs as a time when “the tail was wagging the dog” as organizations struggled to figure out where their employees were going to end up working and how to support them.
If that was the way of 2020, then 2021 has been much more encouraging. Maybe the pandemic isn’t over, but enterprises have figured out how to speed up their adoption of services that can keep their businesses up and running.
“On a business front, it’s still hard to believe what 2021 has brought, as we continue to see that Covid accelerated things, rather than changed things,” Andrews said, explaining that a year ago CIOs were too consumed with logistical challenges to think progressively.
“As we went through 2021 I was pleasantly surprised to see that narrative go away,” Andrews said. “And now when I meet the CIO, she's going to talk about her business problems, and how those manifest themselves into conversations about applications and data… Customers are being more decisive.”
For Lumen, those conversations fueled sales progress that the company saw in the second and third quarters of this year. “So I guess I'm somewhat surprised or happy that the sales funnel is larger than was pre-pandemic for this point in the year,” Andrews said.
That means Lumen can continue to expand with confidence by growing its investment in the Lumen platform, edge computing, managed services, unified communications, cybersecurity and other services and capabilities to “wrap around” its enterprise offerings. Lumen’s enterprise business accounts about three-quarters of the company's revenue, so “there’s a huge investment going into that digital experience,” he said.
But the most significant area of investment is Lumen’s Quantum fiber buildout program. The company last month said it was more than doubling its annual rate of fiber passings from the typical 400,000 to more than 1 million, with plans to accelerate that passings rate even more in the years to come. It has been able to commit to a more aggressive buildout by bring down the cost of passings to under $1,000.
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Supply chain challenges have a way of derailing such grand expectations, and they have done so this year from companies ranging from semiconductor suppliers to auto makers. However, Andrews said that while Lumen continues to keep an eye on the supply chain, it has yet to find itself short of equipment and supplies necessary for the Quantum program.