Lumen’s NaaS Platform Surpasses 1,000 Enterprise Users As Company Steers ‘Into AI Lane’
The milestone of 1,000 customers speaks to the demand for flexible network infrastructure in an AI world and marks the ‘exciting first phase’ of investment and development for Lumen’s Network-as-a-Service platform, Dave Shacochis, Lumen’s senior vice president of product strategy, tells CRN.
Lumen Technologies, formerly CenturyLink, has surpassed 1,000 customers on its Network-As-A-Service (NaaS) platform, which is experiencing rapid growth as a result of new enterprise AI infrastructure demands, the company told CRN.
The major milestone for the Lumen NaaS platform, which became available in July 2023, was reached because many enterprise IT decision-makers are starting to rethink their network architecture in light of AI workloads, said Dave Shacochis (pictured), Lumen’s senior vice president of product strategy.
“I think the age of AI has really created a market moment for service platforms like NaaS to really rise up and meet it because the age of AI is driving so much change and reconfigurability throughout many different elements of the enterprise, who are all scrambling to try to figure out what their innovation vectors are and how they keep up,” he said. “I think this is the exciting first phase of what’s a lot of investment and development that’s still to come around the Lumen NaaS platform."
The telecom-turned-service-provider, under the direction of President and CEO Kate Johnson, has set its sights on growth by way of digital, multi-cloud and NaaS offerings in recent years. To that end, Lumen in May introduced Lumen Connectivity Fabric, a set of network services that can be remotely managed via the cloud. Services on the digital platform include connectivity, infrastructure, security and communications services, as well as media and entertainment. Taking the next step in that strategy, Lumen took to its second-quarter 2025 earnings call last month to introduce the Lumen Connected Ecosystem, which customers can use to purchase, provision and manage their network services as easily as they do their cloud solutions, such as NaaS, according to the company.
Lumen is differentiating itself from its telecom peers by focusing on where network infrastructure is being built to power AI, Shacochis said.
“There’s going to be a lot of demand as enterprises look at what AI needs to mean for their business— they’re all looking at updating their network architecture in order to be there so we’re really focusing on enterprises [and] the way they are thinking about multi-cloud and hybrid architecture,” he said. “There’s lots of space in the public communications industry to focus on. We’re just really steering into the AI lane and the demand that it’s going to put on enterprises.”
Lumen’s NaaS platform is the company's digitalized collection of networking services with usage-based pricing. Among the most sought-after services include Internet on Demand, which is popular for large events that need to dramatically scale demand up and down, such as the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. Another popular NaaS offering is Ethernet on Demand, which is used for direct connections between on-premises, data center environments and public clouds, Shacochis said.
Lumen’s cybersecurity services, he added, are integrated with all of the company’s NaaS offerings and can be layered on.
“An Internet On Demand service can very easily be complemented with something like Lumen Defender, which will proactively block a lot of the cyberthreats that we know about through our threat intel research facility called Black Lotus Labs,” Shacochis said.
The pivot to NaaS is proof that Lumen is “maniacally focused” on customer success, CEO Johnson told CRN in an exclusive interview in May.
“What we’re hearing from [customers] is that the networks of yesterday don’t serve this multi-cloud, AI-first world. They’re not big enough, they’re not fast enough, they’re not smart enough, they’re not secure enough. So, as we seek to delight those enterprise customers, they’re looking for a couple of things. They’re looking for us to innovate, to bring them new constructs. They’re looking for us to serve them in a way that they’ve grown accustomed in the world of cloud. So, imagine—fire up any port, any service, anytime, anywhere and only pay for what you consume? They’re already used to that with cloud, but they don’t get that from traditional telecom carriers, and so we’re bringing them what not only they have gotten used to, but what they really need to be agile and flexible and innovative in a multi-cloud world,” she said.
The opportunity for channel partners around Lumen's NaaS platform centers on similar benefits that partners saw with the cloud, Shacochis said.
“Channel professionals see how automated platforms with instant activation [and] high degrees of configurability can become real value drivers. [Solution providers] have long been asking for greater levels of automation and engagement from their telecommunications partners, and that’s really the opportunity that NaaS presents," he said.
A number of Lumen's 1,000 NaaS customers have come in through the channel, he added.
Lumen counts many large enterprises and well-known brands as current NaaS customers, including GE Vernova, Best Buy and Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
Monroe, La.-based Lumen has largely shifted its operations in recent years toward business services, which now account for about 75 percent of its revenue.