... On surviving carrier consolidation as a channel partner according to panelists on the Executive Roundtable at the Fall 2006 Channel Partners Conference & Expo (see related story).
“When you do have these megamergers, it does leave holes from an agent perspective. Last year, we were selling AT&T, SBC, MCI and Verizon often in all the major metro markets. Today, you can only sell two of those. ... What their go-to-market strategies will be are yet to evolve.”
—Greg Praske, ARG co-founder and CEO
“If you look at post-divestiture telecom ... it’s going through the same kind of maturations as many industries go through. ... If some of the bigger players are not going to embrace the agent community, it represents an area of opportunity for some of the smaller players to offer better services to the agent community, and they’ll get more market share.”
—Geoff Shepstone, Telecom Brokerage Inc. president and owner
“We’re looking for partners who add value in many different ways to the customer experience overall.We absolutely understand that there are pre-sales and install and lifecycle issues that customers go through. ... It’s the business model that’s got more depth and structure that I think adds the real value.”
—Jim Delis, XO Communications Inc. president of indirect sales
“Success buys you freedom and the success we’ve had in the channel has led towards further funds being available for the channel to help continue to fuel it and maintain the growth that we’ve had. ...We’re going to be spending a lot more money in 2007 on the channel than we did in 2006, which surpassed what we did in 2005. That’s only possible because of the results the channel delivers.”
—Ken Bisnoff, TelePacific Communications Inc. senior vice president of strategic opportunities
