Lumen Cloud Communications, a new service that aims to help businesses migrate their communications services to the cloud, offers voice services, team messaging, video conferencing, mobile applications, and specialty lines.
Platform highlights include:
- Centralized management that generates analytics.
- Automated provisioning that enables remote deployment with “limited involvement from Lumen support staff.”
- Online customer ordering and management giving customers the ability to add extensions or direct numbers to their account quickly.
- A voice portal that offers a variety of customized settings and API integrations enabling easy control of porting and number activation.
The full-stack carrier-grade plain old telephone services (POTS) replacement leverages technology platforms developed by Alianza, Inc.
Lumen says that the platform enables quick activation of services and supports elevator phones, alarming, security systems and remote access modems. It enables customers to order, deploy, manage and use services through an administrative portal.
Cloud based services are attractive because they shift capital expenditures to ongoing operational expenditures (capex to opex) and offload many operational duties to third parties in the cloud. The cloud approach provides the expertise to run those systems, which enables the client to focus more fully on its core business and eliminates the need to hire personnel with that skill set. Organizations need to balance these advantages against any perceived loss of control that such a strategy represents.
“Through Alianza’s platform, we are strengthening our portfolio of next generation cloud services to enable the speed, scale, and agility the market demands,” Scott Velting, Lumen’s vice president of product management, said in a press release about Lumen Cloud Communications. “Together, we are uniquely positioned to help Lumen’s customers successfully navigate from legacy voice services to the cloud.”
Lumen, formerly CenturyLink, has approximately 500,000 route miles worldwide and has business customers in more than 60 countries.
Alianza, which serves more than 200 service providers worldwide, introduced Managed Specialty Lines, the cloud-based plain old telephone service (POTS) replacement solution for service providers last December.
