As as president and CEO of AboveNet Inc., Bill LaPerch heads up one of the country’s fastest-growing metro optical network providers with $360 million in annual revenue, 2,200 on-net buildings and 2.1 million fiber miles. The company is relatively new to the channel; its program is just four years old. But LaPerch is encouraged by early results despite the carrier’s non-transactional (read non-channel-friendly) service line, which is all big bandwidth services. The success lead him to make his first appearance at the channel’s primary trade show, The Channel Partners Conference & Expo in March. PHONE+ sat down with LaPerch on March 2 to discuss the company’s channel.
 |
| AboveNet CEO Bill LaPerch |
PHONE+: How many agents do you have?
Bill LaPerch: It’s increasing all the time. It’s become a significant part of our growth.
PHONE+: What do you mean by significant?
BL: ...It’s our fastest growing sales channel. It’s far outpacing our direct sales channel in terms of growth. A little bit of that is it’s grown from nothing.
What is the channel’s contribution?
BL: Our channel revenue is less than 10 percent but growing very fast.
PHONE+: Was this an initiative that you encouraged or was it brought to you?
BL: We actually argued about it internally for quite some time. We are always looking for ways to expand our reach from a sales perspective, but we thought that because of our specific sales focus on 100mbps and above solutions, we were wondering how suited we were for the agent world. We typically had a long sales cycle; we had a long install cycle. It wasn’t T1s; it wasn’t voice; it wasn’t ISDN lines. It was a sale that very often would take two years from start to finish.
PHONE+: Ultimately, you decided to go ahead. What put you over the edge?
BL: A couple of things: One, as Ethernet continued to emerge, we were able to standardize a lot of our products and make their delivery more predictable and the pricing schedules more predictable. In essence, we were able to communicate with the channel partners what we were about, how long it took to install and how much it would cost. The other thing was the realization that — it may sound naïve — there are a great deal of value-added resellers that have long-term relationships with customers and they are able to effectively compete and add value to us with these more complex, long sales cycle type deals. With that in mind, we said, “Let’s get this started.”
