Lumen’s aspiration for enterprise is a perfect combination of cloud, edge and network. Lumen is pushing hard to effect a vision of a seamlessly interconnected world of industrial sites, clouds, edges and the facilities that make them work together. In many ways, cloud – in all its versions – is the killer app for fast, everywhere networks. Networks, on the flip side, are either the boon or bane of cloud. Good networks make clouds sing. Weak networks reveal cloud’s Achilles’ heel. Lumen wants to be the global carrier to knit them together, into a seamless, latency-appropriate, whole. This week, Lumen announced yet another brick in its slow-but-consistent rollout of its platform for “Industry 4.0”: Lumen Edge Bare Metal. This capability provides a higher level of performance, latency, security and most importantly predictability and joins their existing offerings including internal cloud capabilities, AWS, Azure and GPC – among with the Lumen optical network. Its plan differs in detail and positioning, but is not unlike Verizon’s VNS – blogged on here. Lumen is also both clear and realistic: its unique differentiator is its network, combined with the ability to orchestrate all the pieces, both Lumen and third party, together into a logical, […]