Lumen and Cisco Deepen Partnership for Remote and Hybrid Work Solutions

More Americans than ever are working from home. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the percentage of American employees working from home jumped from 22 percent to 42 percent between 2019 and 2020, according to data from the U.S. government’s American Time Use Survey. While some workplaces have brought workers back to the office with precautions such as social distancing and mask wearing, a considerable number of Americans continue to work remotely.

The success of remote working depends on a number of things, chief among them a company’s remote work infrastructure for communications and collaboration. As remote and hybrid work environments become the norm – with many American workers saying they’d like to continue remote working indefinitely -- and technology continues to advance, some companies are looking for new ways to provide reliable, fast, and secure collaboration solutions that maximize their existing unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) investments.

To enable better hybrid and remote work environments, telecommunications solutions providers Lumen Technologies and Cisco recently announced they have expanded their partnership to include a new offering: Lumen Solutions for Cisco Unified Communications Manager Cloud (UCMC). This new product pairs Cisco's most advanced, cloud-based collaboration services with the reliability and speed of Lumen's global fiber network, which makes it an ideal solution for businesses that have already invested in Cisco Webex, or those that are considering it, according to the two companies.

"Because of the pandemic, enterprises all around the world have realized that the future of work includes remote and hybrid environments, so they are investing heavily in cloud solutions that integrate calling, conferencing, file sharing, and software applications," said Scott Velting, Lumen’s VP of product management, voice and collaboration solutions, in a statement. "Our expanded partnership with Cisco will enable current and future users of Cisco Webex to deploy flexible, agile, and efficient collaboration technologies without large capital investments, ongoing maintenance, or high IT expenses for staffing and training."

The new solution resulting from the partnership was designed to be a comprehensive, enterprise-level unified communications and collaboration service from the Cisco cloud that enables companies to become more flexible, agile, and efficient. Customers can avoid large capital investments, ongoing maintenance, and high IT staffing expenses, and they have access to Lumen's global network, and operations and support teams.

Service features include business VoIP calling, messaging, Cisco Webex integration, instant messaging, presence mobility, mobile and remote access, emergency call handling, collaboration phones and endpoints, network connectivity options, global availability, Lumen global 24/7 support and dedicated account teams.