Lumen Technologies appointed Jim Ortbals as its new SVP for global partner solutions.

Ortbals joins Lumen after a year-and-a-half in a similar role for security vendor BeyondTrust. The exec's cybersecurity background has seen him serve in VPs role for Deep Instinct, Zscaler, and Zerto, serving at the latter between 2018 and 2020 before its acquisition by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).

Before Zerto, Ortbals worked as commercial and cloud sales director at VMware, joining the virtual machine giant in 2016.

Between 2013 and 2016, Ortbals worked as director of global sales VP for digital workplace management vendor Voss, following a director role steering Allot Communications' North America channel.

Ortbals biggest networking stint to date was at Cisco, where he served between 2006 and 2013, exiting the networking giant as senior manager for commercial and cloud partner sales.

Prior to Cisco, his first global sales role was at soft-switch provider Sylantro Systems, as preceded by various positions at AT&T, Nortel Networks, and Sprint.

"Lumen is building the physical and digital foundation customers need to compete in the AI economy, and strong partner ecosystems are essential to making that transformation real," Ortbals wrote of his new position on LinkedIn. "I’m looking forward to working with our teams and partners to connect strategy to execution and deliver meaningful customer outcomes."

In a recent interview with SDxCentral, Lumen CEO Kate Johnson discussed the firm's channel ecosystem, saying its partnerships were driving what she called "the largest expansion of the internet in history."

"It's all powered by the hyperscalers and the neoclouds and the social platforms doing the private connectivity fabric deals with us for this massive upgrade," Johnson said. "They are tapping Lumen to be the trusted network for AI. ... The one thing big tech doesn't have is time, and we give them time. We're selling time by giving them access to our network, to upgrade certain parts of it so that they can leverage it quite quickly. Those contracts are limited to only provide data center interconnect for the hyperscalers to train their models; they're not allowed to resell those services. So it really is a supply chain partnership that we're very proud of."

"Now that we've built a digital platform to interconnect, it's going to get easier, and easier, and easier to leverage Lumen to move your data," Johnson added.