How Network Automation & Orchestration is Accelerating Customer Service Delivery for Lumen

At Itential, our goal is to help ensure each of our customers and partners drive significant business value through network automation and we’ve had the unique experience of doing both for Lumen, one of the leading global telecommunications providers. As both a partner and customer of Itential, Lumen is constantly innovating on how they can deliver the fastest, most secure services to both internal and external customers. Over the years, we’ve had the pleasure of working together on a lot of projects, but recently the VP of North American Operations of Lumen, Richard Batelaan, joined Itential’s CTO Chris Wade on the keynote stage at ONUG Fall 2021 to discuss how they were able to accelerate customer service delivery through network automation and orchestration with Itential.

Here’s a short recap of their discussion on how Lumen was able to help their enterprise customers keep a competitive advantage by automating their internal processes with Itential:

The Need to Meet Enterprise Market Demands

Enterprises are going through the same digital transformation that most service providers have been going through for the past couple of years and it turns out that the goals they’re trying to accomplish are very similar – better customer experience at a lower cost, while accelerating the pace of innovation. That’s why Lumen was determined to develop a platform that would provide their customers with the agility and capabilities needed to address new market demands.

For example, the increased demand for latency sensitive, higher bandwidth services to enable a more distributed workforce has changed the way enterprises order and consume network infrastructure. At the same time, enterprises are increasing their utilization of cloud-based services and applications. For Lumen, they needed a way to leverage automation and orchestration to enable their enterprise customers to rapidly respond to changing market demands through agile, on-demand network and edge cloud services. This is where Itential comes in.

Accelerating Customer Service Delivery through Automation & Orchestration with Itential

With increasing network complexity across edge and hybrid cloud, the team at Lumen needed to find a way to unify multiple disparate processes and technologies – from internal processes, customer purchase workflows, and disparate to networking technologies with order management, service provisioning and service assurance across multiple network domains.

With the Itential Automation Platform, Lumen was able to transition from manual effort intensive, time consuming processes toward an API-first, machine-first model, that automates activities across field operations, service assurance, and service delivery.

We were very excited to work together on this use case as the core capabilities of our platform were best suited to enable their transformation. First, Lumen leveraged the unique, rapid integration capabilities of the Itential platform to integrate with the control systems for each separate networks, with over 50+ unique systems and network technologies and internal custom-built processes and systems. These integrations provide end-to-end visibility and management, streamlining and accelerating service delivery to Lumen customers.

By utilizing a platform-centric, modular approach to their automation infrastructure, Lumen can provide their customers with the flexibility to adjust their network services to accommodate their changing needs, including provisioning for services such as bandwidth-on-demand, cloud services, and edge services.

Another big success we’re very proud of that came out of this project is how Lumen is continuing to enable their domain experts across operations and engineer personnel to participate in developing and executing a wide range of automations with Itential’s low-code Automation Studio. By implementing a low-code approach, Lumen can avoid time-consuming and costly development cycles and could instead focus on transforming their business.

The ease of use of the Itential Automation Platform enabled Lumen to quickly deliver end-to-end automations scaling over tens of millions of jobs and tasks, enabling their enterprise customers to onboard new services quicker and faster than ever. Their enterprise customers can quickly evolve their connectivity to incorporate agile, on-demand and responsive network and cloud services.

You can watch the full keynote session here:

By leveraging Itential automation and orchestration, Lumen has exposed the ability for enterprises to accelerate their transformation using their cloud orchestration capabilities, ensuring their customers can accelerate innovation. You can learn more about the work Lumen and Itential have done together in this case study.