Edge solutions provider Lumen Technologies doubled the number of Latin American customers that acquired its edge services in 2021.
The continent’s growing interest in Lumen’s services came from industries requiring low latency such as content creation, entertainment, e-commerce, and public cloud providers.
In recent years, Lumen has focused on growing its client base in Latin American countries through a series of investments and acquisitions.
Last year, it expanded its regional data centres with facilities in Buenos Aires (Argentina), São Paulo (Brazil), Cali (Colombia), Quito (Ecuador), and Lima (Peru). The expansion resulted in a 12% increase in installed capacity across the continent.
Typically a foot behind North American companies, Latin American markets have been gaining momentum in demand for video streaming platforms. This has translated into an increased uptake of content delivery network (CDN) providers and ultra-high definition (UHD) streaming solutions.
For Lumen, this meant deploying additional points of presence in 15 new Latin American cities along with 545 miles of optical fibre.
Such growth in the Latin American market came alongside major shifts for Lumen. In July 2021, the company announced it was selling off its LatAm business for $2.7 billion (£2bn) to American investment firm Stonepeak.
Laurinda Pang, president of global customer success at Lumen, addressed the divestiture at a Morgan Stanley conference in March.
“We have made the announcement with regards to Latin America, we expect that transaction to close in the beginning of the third quarter of 2022. So the entirety of that region will go to Stonepeak, so that’s all of the physical network assets, the subsea assets that connect the region, as well as obviously all of the people as part of that business,” she said.
2021 also saw Lumen bring direct connectivity to four new cloud providers’ data centres and an improvement in security levels for SD-WAN solutions.
Leonardo Barbero, SVP of product, access management, and network planning at Lumen, said: “We aim to deliver robust, high-quality, maximum-security services that allow our customers to benefit from limitless growth. We are constantly keeping an eye on trends to anticipate needs and provide cutting-edge solutions.”
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