Lumen Technologies continues to show robust growth of its network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform, growth that will soon gain more updates to better position the offering in an increasingly competitive NaaS market.

Lumen CEO Kate Johnson during the company’s latest earnings call noted that Lumen had surpassed 1,500 NaaS enterprise customers at the end of its latest quarter, a significant 50% increase from where that number stood at the end of the previous quarter. Johnson highlighted further growth opportunities based on Lumen’s recent updates to its Internet On-Demand service.

Scott Yow, Lumen's SVP of product, explained to SDxCentral that the main component of those updates is the ability for customers to now provision fiber access to locations outside of Lumen’s owned footprint. This is done through agreements with last-mile providers for that access with customer control done through Lumen’s dashboard.

“That removes the limitation for businesses who may have some locations we have direct fiber connectivity, and some we don't,” Yow explained.

Johnson had previously lauded the NaaS offering for taking business from data center companies but also in helping to drive more business to Lumen’s cloud service provider partners.

That former disruption is based on Lumen being able to tie together its physical and virtual infrastructure in a package that makes it easier for enterprises to manage their data connectivity. The latter is in turning that easier management into more direct traffic-generating opportunities for hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“And when I say higher, like it's an incredible rate,” Johnson teased of that interest during a Lumen earnings call earlier this year. “I don't want to give it right now, but over the past 90 days, very, very significant growth. And what that suggests is that there's a faster path to revenue for the cloud companies, partnering with Lumen to provide networking for their end customers.”

NaaS needs

That opportunity has led Lumen to bolster its owned network capabilities. This includes the recent lighting of 400 Gb/s (400G) connectivity in more than a dozen markets that allows faster speeds for customers to access third-party applications and cloud on-ramps.

More specific to Lumen’s Internet On-Demand NaaS offering, Yow noted that most of the initial uptake has been for 10G connections due to the long-haul nature of the service.

“This is really more around remote offices, branch offices, buildings, not necessarily data centers, where you're going to need that huge, multiple 100G capacity,” Yow said.

For those higher-throughput, AI-related needs, Yow pointed to Lumen’s recently launched RapidRoutes initiative to meet those needs. That program is around pre-defined, high-demand network connections ranging from 100G to 400G, in a bid to make network procurement easier.

Rivals have also moved to ease NaaS adoption.

Zayo, for example, recently launched its DynamicLink NaaS offering that allows operators to instantly configure 1G, 10G, or 100G connections, adjust bandwidth, and add security services through a single self-service platform. This includes real-time network configuration for Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Ethernet, Cloudlink, and IP-VPN across the entirety of Zayo’s network, with users able to manage network settings and cloud connectivity directly, eliminating manual provisioning.

Zayo noted that its offering is superior to that of rivals in that those others fail to meet the definition of true NaaS from analyst firm Gartner: highly automated network configuration models with self-service interfaces and dynamic scaling.

Yow’s explanation of Lumen’s fabric port offering does seem to align with those requirements.

“One of the advantages we have is there is multiservice,” Yow said. “Where maybe you start, because you need Internet On-Demand, but now I need multicloud connectivity, now I need VPN connectivity, maybe I need a voice service, maybe I need a cloud on-ramp to GCP or AWS, etc. Once a customer has a port with us in their portal, they can digitally go enable all the services. There's no truck roll required. It's all digitally provisioned because we have that programmable network infrastructure and the reach and connectivity to all those different providers.”

Yow added that Lumen is confident in its technology moves, with the main focus now on continuing to extend its owned footprint and execute on driving enterprise adoption.

“We're happy with the 1,500 but we'd like to get that to 15,000, so there's work to do there,” Yow said of Lumen’s current enterprise base, adding, “we put a lot of investments in and the technology, it's not unobtanium, it's not experimental, it's proven technology that we're scaling out. So now it's really around execution. Getting the customers, closing the deals, and expanding our customer base in this area.”