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Lumen and VMware Expand Partnership to Drive Rapid Innovation at the Edge

LUMN | February 3, 2021

Companies to Establish a Joint Innovation Lab to Accelerate Customers’ Ability to Build, Run, Manage, Connect, and Protect Applications Across Distributed Infrastructure

Lumen Technologies (NYSE: LUMN) and VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) today announced a significant expansion of their partnership to fast-track the design, development, and delivery of edge computing and more secure, work-from-anywhere solutions. Lumen and VMware’s combined capabilities will enable customers to deliver future-forward experiences for any application, to any device, from the global cloud core to the distributed network edge.

Automated factories. Smart cities. Telemedicine. These interaction-intensive experiences require the orchestration of compute, network, and data resources closer to the customer to deliver low latency, and intrinsically secure applications. To lay the foundation for advanced workloads, Lumen and VMware will form a Joint Innovation Lab, bringing together architecture and design, marketing, and sales resources. The teams will focus initial efforts on co-developing solutions for the Lumen portfolio of managed services in key areas including:

Edge Computing: Certifying the integration of the VMware Tanzu Basic edition with the Lumen Edge Bare Metal service and Lumen Dynamic Connections. This combination will enable businesses to create a more secure software supply chain to rapidly deploy new edge-native workloads, on-demand, closer to the point of digital interaction.

Work-from-anywhere: Adding VMware’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform – inclusive of VMware SD-WAN and VMware Workspace ONE – to the Lumen solutions set. Many organizations now manage distributed workforces, making legacy solutions – including hub-and-spoke-based VPNs – obsolete. This initiative will help customers more seamlessly adopt SASE architecture to achieve the reliability and performance of a traditional network, as well as deliver superior customer and employee experiences, in a Zero Trust model.

Security: Integrating VMware Carbon Black Cloud Endpoint and VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload with intelligence data from Black Lotus Labs, the threat research arm of Lumen. Enterprises will be better positioned to defend against cyber-threats, right from the end point, using the combination of security analytics derived from one of the world’s most deeply peered networks and industry-leading endpoint protection and datacenter virtualization.

“Resilient edge computing solutions will drive the next wave of digital innovation for the enterprise and customers need the right capabilities to effectively create, deploy, and manage applications in this new environment,” said Jeff Storey, president and chief executive officer, Lumen Technologies. “This deliberate move to invest in and accelerate our efforts with VMware will allow us to quickly bring to market software-defined solutions that address the real issues our customers face as they move applications to the edge. That is powerful.”

“We see an exploding set of edge use cases that will result in every human experience becoming digital,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer, VMware. “These trends have only been accelerated as a result of the pandemic. Materializing these opportunities requires strong partnership by proven technical leaders. The Lumen-VMware partnership will provide the exact combination required to transform business processes and customer experience.”

About Lumen Technologies:

Lumen is guided by our belief that humanity is at its best when technology advances the way we live and work. With approximately 450,000 route fiber miles and serving customers in more than 60 countries, we deliver the fastest, most secure platform for applications and data to help businesses, government and communities deliver amazing experiences. Learn more about the Lumen network, edge cloud, security, communication and collaboration solutions and our purpose to further human progress through technology at news.lumen.com/home , LinkedIn: /lumentechnologies, Twitter: @lumentechco, Facebook: /lumentechnologies, Instagram: @lumentechnologies and YouTube: /lumentechnologies. Lumen and Lumen Technologies are registered trademarks of Lumen Technologies LLC in the United States. Lumen Technologies LLC is a wholly owned affiliate of CenturyLink Inc.

About VMware

VMware software powers the world’s complex digital infrastructure. The company’s cloud, networking and security, and digital workspace offerings provide a dynamic and efficient digital foundation to customers globally, aided by an extensive ecosystem of partners. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, VMware is committed to being a force for good, from its breakthrough innovations to its global impact. For more information, please visit https://www.vmware.com/company.html .

VMware, Tanzu, VMware SASE platform, Workspace ONE, VMware SD-WAN, Carbon Black, and Carbon Black Cloud are registered trademarks or trademarks of VMware, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other jurisdictions.

This article may contain hyperlinks to non-VMware websites that are created and maintained by third parties who are solely responsible for the content on such websites.

VMware makes no guarantee that services announced in preview or beta will become available at a future date. The information in this press release is for informational purposes only and may not be incorporated into any contract.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for historical and factual information, the matters set forth in this release identified by words such as “will,” “expects,” “believes,” and similar expressions are forward-looking statements as defined by the federal securities laws, and are subject to the “safe harbor” protections thereunder. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results and are based on current expectations only, and are subject to various uncertainties. Actual events and results may differ materially from those anticipated by us in those statements for several reasons. We may change our intentions or plans discussed in our forward-looking statements without notice at any time and for any reason.