CenturyLink seeks enlightenment with new brand

US telco CenturyLink has seen the light and reinvented itself as Lumen Technologies.

In a bid to position itself as a leading light in the market for the provision of enterprise solutions and services in new areas such as the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, collaboration and automation, CenturyLink has shed its legacy brand in favour of Lumen Technologies, or simply Lumen.

It is pitching itself as a platform to enable its customers to capitalise on what it describes as the fourth industrial revolution. The Lumen platform brings together the telco’s global fibre network, its edge cloud capabilities, security, and collaboration solutions, it explained, in an announcement that was sadly lacking in light-related puns. Shame.

On a more serious note, it’s clear that Lumen is keen to embrace change in the telecoms market, as operators move further away from simply being providers of connectivity and basic communications services to supporting their customers as they undertake digital transformations. While the Lumen brand will not apply to all of the telco’s lines of business, the fact that the firm plans to change its legal name, upon satisfaction of all regulatory requirements, and its stock ticker shows that its focus is squarely on the enterprise and global network space going forward.

That said, the telco has not forgotten its consumer and small business operations, which actually account for a fair chunk of its revenues; the consumer market alone generated 25% of the operator’s US$5.2 billion turnover in the most recent quarter, for example. Small customers are getting a new name too…or some of them are.

The operator has introduced the Quantum Fiber brand for connectivity and services delivered to consumer and small business customers over fibre infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the CenturyLink brand will not disappear from the market just yet. “CenturyLink, with its strong heritage, will remain as a trusted brand for residential and small business customers over traditional networks,” the operator said.

But with the company pushing its high-speed broadband offers pretty hard, it’s probably safe to assume that CenturyLink-branded DSL services will not be around for too many more years. The brand changes are really all about that enterprise play though.

“Unfortunately, today’s network, cloud and IT architectures present latency, cost and security challenges that inhibit the performance of distributed applications and real-time data processing,” said Lumen’s chief marketing officer Shaun Andrews, in a video message.

“Ultimately, the world needs a new architecture platform that has been designed to support the intensive performance requirements of next-generation applications. And that is exactly what we aim to provide with Lumen,” he said.