“I’m envisioning, as I listen to you guys talk, a network mesh of data. And then, over time, applied intelligence against that data in my cloud…and this gives me scale, along with the ability to attract ecosystem partners for innovation. That seems to be the innovation cocktail, if you will, for the next decade.” Dave Vellante, theCUBE, August 28, 2018.

It’s always awesome to meet so many smart and interesting people here at industry events like VMworld. With so many great conversations and sessions, and an exhibit hall filled with amazing demos, attendees have so much to absorb. This week, I had the chance to stream one of these great conversations with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin of theCUBE, along with Greg Kaffenberger of VMware.  The quote above from Dave jumped out at me, not just because it was a clever turn of phrase, but because he basically describes our business plan for the next 10 years at CenturyLink. Thanks Dave!

The number of experts and the amount of information at major industry events like this is mind-boggling. Trying to absorb it all is like drinking from a firehose. But in our discussion, we were able to really net down the three key elements of this Innovation Cocktail for the 21^st century:

1. Have your critical data sources been turned into services?
2. Are your critical services part of a securely accessible scale platform?
3. Is your innovation platform connected to an ecosystem of innovators?

To the first point, we talked about the opportunities for fixtures in the built environment as a strategic source of data. CenturyLink has been innovating at this for quite some time, and our recent success as technology partner for US Bank stadium reminded all of us how important it is to think outside the box around data sources.

Around the second point, we discussed about the double-challenge of making sure that data sources are well-connected but still securely protected. With CenturyLink’s ability to connect workloads across all major cloud platforms, and then protect those workloads with threat intelligence and machine learning, we see customers more empowered to take this next step towards cloud-scale Innovation.

And to the third point, the requirements for maintaining a flexible ecosystem of well-integrated partners is what VMworld 2018 is all about. Between CenturyLink’s network integration with Vmware Cloud on AWS, and its VMware Cloud Verified accreditation around Private Cloud, we understand the partnering angle well. We’re looking at a number of different ways to accelerate our ecosystem effect by unifying our customer experience under a common platform architecture that enables IT Solutions that are differentiated by network and security benefits, powered by CenturyLink.

You can check out the full version of our conversation on TheCube.net. Check it out here.

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