Lumen CEO Kate Johnson On ‘Rewriting The Story Of Networking’

‘Change is really hard for enterprises, and I have a lot of empathy for that, and at the same time I want to help them thrive. What we see in the world of AI is that this adaptive, dynamic, digital networking platform is essential, not just to survive, but to thrive,’ Lumen CEO Kate Johnson tells CRN.

Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson has officially been at the helm of the service provider for three years this month. In that time, she has embarked on a transformation journey to shift the legacy telecom provider, made up of CenturyLink and Level 3 Communications assets, toward value-added, strategic network services for enterprises leveraging the company’s vast fiber footprint.

One way the company is doing this is through the Lumen Connected Ecosystem, a way for customers to purchase, provision and manage their network services as easily as they do their cloud solutions. To that end, Lumen is teaming up with some of the biggest technology partners in the market to offer joint services for businesses and through channel partners, including HPE and NaaS Specialist Meter. Revealed Tuesday at MeterUp 2025 in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled Lumen x Meter, a service that brings together Lumen’s unified WAN and Meter’s LAN in a convenient, "click-to-buy" model for enterprises. It’s one example of the services that partners and customers can expect from the Connected Ecosystem, Johnson said.

At the MeterUp event this week, Johnson sat down with CRN to talk about the company’s growth strategy and the importance of the technology partnerships that Lumen is forging, what she has learned in her three years as CEO of a major service provider, and what partners can expect from Lumen moving forward.

Here are excerpts from the conversation.

Lumen has relationships with the likes of Meter and HPE. How important is the Connected Ecosystem for Lumen’s growth plans?

Our growth strategy is three parts. One, we’re going to continue to invest in our physical network because it is the original competitive advantage. The second piece is, we built this digital layer on top [of the] connectivity fabric to make it easy to connect anywhere to anywhere, quickly, securely, effortlessly. The Connected Ecosystem brings it all together in a way that gives us commercial expansion capabilities with ease. I think one of the things that the tech industry has been great at is this creation of the ecosystem where everything works together, and if it doesn’t, it’s probably not going to make it to the table. We’re bringing that to telco for the first time and integrating our offerings with technology capabilities. And, like I said, putting networking at the table where decisions are made about which technology solutions people are buying, and just making it a no-brainer to pick.

In our normal sales motions, we provide connectivity, and while we’re typically talking to infrastructure buyers, we do support our customers as they expand into a new area and grow a new business, let’s say they deploy an ERP, or they’re making a database migration, or they’re moving things to cloud, or whatever. What we are doing is looking at the places where there’s the most critical need for networking, so huge swaths of data that need to be moved from point to point [and] where there are technology companies that are growing that have a strong need for digital network services. So, think backup and recovery. This is a place that is so ripe for disruption because the thing that stands in the way after a security breach is restoration. You’ve got to get all that data into a cloud that’s contained, and how quickly you can move that data into the cloud really matters. So, being able to turn the circuit on, biggest pipe possible [and] super intelligent to know how to be adapted for best performance, all of those things are being integrated into partner solutions like Commvault or Rubrik.

Why are partnerships with companies like Meter so critical to Lumen’s growth strategy?

It’s all about growing. Partners extend your reach, and they extend it in a really specific way. Obviously, channel partners can help us grow every industry. But then there are specialty plays and specialty partnerships with technology companies that we’re focusing on where we integrate our products and give networking a seat at the table where business decision-makers are making important decisions about what technology they buy. So, for example, with the Meter and Lumen partnership, together we’re solving a problem called ‘complexity.’ With their intelligent LAN platform and our intelligent WAN platform with this unified procurement through deployment and customer experience, we’re taking all the complexity [out] and just making it easy to take what you need in the world of AI and thrive. So, it’s about reach, it’s about specialty, it’s about integration, it’s about customer experience.

At a time when many of Lumen’s competitors are leaning into their traditional telecom roots, why is Lumen doing something different?

I think it’s all about the assets. We have the best fiber network. It’s long-haul. It’s got great coverage across the country. It’s got unique routes, and there’s a strong need for enterprises to be able to ship giant data workloads from anywhere to anywhere, and it starts with our asset being uniquely positioned to do that. And then we have the capital to be able to continue to expand that, but also to make it easy to consume with the digital platform, and that’s very different from where some of the traditional carriers like AT&T and Verizon are going. They’re focusing all of their capital investments on consumer. They’re building fiber to the home and focusing on their wireless business. That’s the return profile that they’re seeking and as that business converges—fiber to the home and wireless— they’re uniquely suited to capture that. And so, I think it’s just a matter of these companies leaning into the assets that give them the most advantage. That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing, and they’re doing what they're doing.

What is the quickest point of entry for partners to monetize with Lumen?

I think the most exciting part of our portfolio and the place where we want channel partners to really align with us is the place where we can go the fastest and grow the fastest, which is in our digital business. So, our NaaS platform is growing really, really rapidly. Partners can help us go faster, and our great wish is for them to really understand the difference in what we’re doing and to bring that to their customers.

What’s the difference between the partners that have been the highest performers for Lumen, and what are the secrets to success for your channel partners?

Honestly, the ones who are open to understanding the problem that we’re trying to solve. Once you understand the problem that the world of Cloud 2.0 has presented, then you really understand the Lumen difference and how we can bring value to customers very, very quickly. Cloud 2.0—the basic premise is that AI is forcing the need to ship a ton of data in between public clouds, or, we call it multi-cloud, at the edge, in between data centers and on-prem and everywhere in between. CIOs are on the hook to deliver insight at the speed of thought, and they need to be able to ship the data wherever the people and applications are, so they need a network that can adapt to support that, and that’s what we’ve built. We’ve built a fabric that is ubiquitous—on net and off Lumen network and universal—it connects all the different combinations, whether it’s on-prem data center or in the cloud. This is really, really unique. We’re going to continue to invest to build this ubiquitous, universal coverage of all the use cases, and we’re the only ones that are very focused on it. So, the partners that can understand that difference and get in the game with us and learn side by side with us, I think they’re really going to benefit from this.

In your three years as CEO of a major service provider, what is the biggest lesson you’ve learned?

I’m pretty much in a position of learning every day. The world is changing so fast, and it has changed so much even since I took over. In the context of Lumen itself, we had a hypothesis that we could turn the company around by investing in our people first and foremost. And I think over the past three years, we’ve taken that from hypothesis to theory, and I’m really excited by that and kind of proud of it because it was a unique way to start this transformation story. It paid off big time because now our people are in the game with us, and what we’re doing is rewriting the story of networking. I think the second thing is how exciting and how challenging it is to disrupt the marketplace. It’s a lot of friction, even when you have value. Change is really hard for enterprises, and I have a lot of empathy for that, and at the same time I want to help them thrive. What we see in the world of AI is that this adaptive, dynamic, digital networking platform is essential, not just to survive, but to thrive. So, bringing that story to [the market] has; it feels like it’s slow going, but at the same time it's only been three years, and we made tremendous progress. I’m trying to be patient, but I’m inherently not terribly patient.

What do you want channel partners to know about the next steps for Lumen?

I think they should know that we’re going to continue to innovate and that we’ve got a pipeline of innovation that is going to bring material value to customers that stick with us. We care about the partner ecosystem. We value it. We probably, in our prioritization, had to wait until we got our mojo back before we could really press the gas pedal, but it’s go time.