Businesses don’t want to wait to receive their data. They want it in their hands … NOW. This is one immediate challenge facing service providers such as CenturyLink Inc., a telecom company utilizing private cloud capabilities to get clients the information they need without delay.

As the computing industry changes at an increasingly rapid pace, CenturyLink strives to stay on top of evolving tech, according to Steve Nolen (pictured), senior product manager of cloud compute at CenturyLink.

Nolen spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the company’s latest product launches, its relationship with VMware Inc., and what it’s doing to relay information to customers faster (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: Let’s start by having you tell our viewers about CenturyLink.

Nolen: CenturyLink is a large, international carrier. With our recent acquisition of Level 3, we have a little over 500,000 fiber optic miles that belong to us. We’re wired into over 100,000 buildings in over 60 countries. We’re connected to over 300 data centers, so that’s kind of our telecom network story. I work within a division that handles the management of hosting products.

Knight: CenturyLink had a big announcement this morning.

Nolen: We released a product option we’ve been working on for about six months. It’s for a private club product that I manage and released about a year-and-a-half ago. We just added new Dell options for that product based on the Dell PowerEdge R640 server. Of course, we did that to expand options and choices for our customers and to open opportunities to those situations when we couldn’t before, so we’re very excited about it.

Miniman: Bring us inside the private cloud and tell us about what you’ve been seeing in the environment. Some of the key use cases to what customers are doing and how this is different than the virtualized environments of the past.

Nolen: What we’ve seen is that there’s this huge move towards the public cloud over these years. The hyper-clouds, all the activity, we see plenty of it, and there’s been challenges associated with it, though you don’t find out on day one. You find out over time. Certain things that were a challenge to work within a public cloud type of scenario.

What we’re seeing now has to do with what private cloud is. It’s an infrastructure that is 100% dedicated to one client. All that infrastructure belongs to one company, one entity. It’s not shared, this is a true private cloud. So, that’s what I manage for our company.

We have one private cloud network that’s been with us for about 15 years. That’s VMware. We’re a large VMware shop. We’re 100% VMware today. We’ve worked with them for a year-and-a-half to be able to create our new private cloud product. That is a hyper-conversion infrastructure with software-defined networking based on the VMware Cloud Foundation, so that’s where the movements are.

If we wanted to go into what’s happening in the industry, you build your compute, your network, your storage and your security. Those are the four minimum columns of what technology you need for a solution, and then you’d connect it all together. It’s done by four different groups, and it can be very time consuming to piece all that together. Now, we roll into this hyperconverged world, and you just give me a stack of servers that has some CPUs, some RAM, and some disks on some well-designed and architected software like VMware Cloud Foundation. It allows enterprise customers to change the environment. I can spin up a firewall in minutes or a server load balancer or a router. That’s very powerful.

Knight: You say milliseconds matter and that customers feel this need to move much faster. We know about the breakneck speed of technological change. Can you give us a real business impact? Can you give us an example of a customer you’re working with and the ROI on this stuff?

Nolen: I can’t name names, but we’re working with some shipping companies who, of course, have little responders when they deliver the package. They have hundreds, maybe as many as a few thousand locations. They want to be able to put that data right in those locations so that the response on that package comes faster. They get closure on that, and they’re able to bill faster. They’re able to move onto the next item and provide the information to their customers faster.

Those are the real examples that we’re seeing with the milliseconds matter type of scenario. We did a demo of this at VMworld last year. We just give an example, and we did a test of going across the internet and then going across a dedicated circuit. And we painted this one page, and it took a second going across the internet. It took a half second to go across the dedicated circuit. That’s now where we’re adding up the costs savings. More efficiencies to your employees when they get information faster.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: CenturyLink Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither CenturyLink nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE