Microsoft Expands Network Capability with Lumen Partnership
Microsoft and Lumen have announced a partnership to expand Microsoft’s network capacity in response to the increasing demand for AI. As part of this collaboration, Lumen will migrate to Microsoft Azure and leverage the Microsoft Cloud. This partnership builds on their longstanding relationship, which includes Lumen’s use of Microsoft Copilot to alleviate employee workloads and the integration of Lumen services with Microsoft Teams.
The computing capabilities of data centers support Microsoft Cloud. To meet the high computational demands of tools like Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft needs to scale up its infrastructure. The tech giant will partner with Lumen to supply the necessary network infrastructure.
Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Azure Core Product and Design, Erin Chapple, stated this in their announcement, “AI is reshaping our daily lives and fundamentally changing how businesses operate. We are focused both on the impact and opportunity for customers relative to AI today, and a generation ahead when it comes to our network infrastructure. Lumen has the network infrastructure and the digital capabilities needed to help support Azure’s mission in creating reliable and scalable platform that supports the breadth of customer workloads—from general purpose and mission-critical, to cloud-native, high-performance computing, and AI, plus what’s on the horizon. Our work with Lumen is emblematic of our investments in our own cloud infrastructure, which delivers for today and for the long term to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”
Lumen offers a Private Connectivity Fabric, a custom network that provides dedicated access to their existing fiber network and supports the installation of new fiber. This fabric also includes the use of Lumen’s digital services.
As part of the partnership, Lumen will migrate its workloads to Microsoft Azure and adopt Microsoft Entra solutions. According to Microsoft, this collaboration is expected to “improve Lumen’s cash flow by more than $20 million” over the next year.
“Azure’s advanced global infrastructure helps customers and partners quickly adapt to changing economic conditions, accelerate technology innovation, and transform their business with AI,” said Chapple. “We are committed to partnering with Lumen to help deliver on their transformation goals, reimagine cloud connectivity and AI synergies, drive business growth, and help customers achieve more.”
The surge in demand for AI tools has prompted many industries to scramble to keep up. The partnership between Lumen and Microsoft aims to address these networking requirements.
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