By Chris Nein, SVP, Channel Sales at Zayo
We’re only a few weeks away from Channel Partners 2025, the premier event for the partner community, held annually in Las Vegas. Our team just wrapped a tremendous 2024 for channel sales at Zayo, and I continue to see exciting growth within the Zayo channel team, our partners, and the impactful work they do for customers. This year, we will continue to grow our commitment to our partners’ success with expanded teams and increased investment.
Here’s what our partners should know about what’s coming from Zayo at Channel Partners and throughout 2025:
Zayo Continues to Grow our Commitment to the Channel
While many of our competitors remain status quo or are reducing their investment in the channel, Zayo continues investing. Contrary to our competitors, we’re putting more money and adding more talented people into our channel organization than ever before.
In the past year, we’ve created and grown a dedicated national channel organization – led by Troy Sedlock – responsible for making it easier for partners to work with Zayo and educating more sellers about our full suite of solutions and services. We have also expanded our AAA program and base sales team to help our partners offer more solutions to their customers. And, as always, our three regional teams of experienced and knowledgeable channel managers will work directly in the field with local selling agents to win more business with enterprise accounts.
This is not to mention our great dedicated support teams including partner success, solutions engineering, and channel marketing. We’ve spent the prior years building this solid channel team foundation, now we’re expanding upon the successes we’ve garnered to date.
Emerging Technologies Create Challenges but Even Greater Opportunities
Here at Zayo, we’re keeping a close eye on emerging technologies like AI and quantum computing. These rapidly advancing technologies are certainly daunting – they’re coming to market so quickly that it can be difficult to wrap your head around them fast enough to take advantage of them before they evolve.
Truly understanding these technologies is essential for long-term success. As technology evolves at an unprecedented pace, it is our responsibility – both as providers and partners – to comprehend its benefits for customers and identify solutions that help them leverage it effectively. Failing to do so puts us at risk of being left behind.
Challenges aside, these technologies also provide tremendous opportunities for the channel. Zayo will talk a lot about being an infrastructure provider for AI at Channel Partners and beyond. We not only have a finger on the AI pulse today, but we’re also investing in a way that will support whatever comes next in AI. We connect data centers where AI sits and does its magic, build special routes to current and future cluster hot spots, and connect users to AI applications. AI is a massive wave, and Zayo is intent on catching it and helping our partners do the same.
If we can educate one another on the real-life applications of AI and find ways to meaningfully introduce solutions that enable customers to tap into this transformative technology, we all win.
Our Most Successful Partners Sell Zayo’s Full Solution Suite – Not Just Our Fiber Offerings
Zayo’s fiber is foundational to our success and something we’ve always thrived in selling. However, today, we can offer so much more than our traditional fiber offerings. With acquisitions in recent years of QOS Networks and Education Networks of America (ENA), plus the reintegration of our Allstream business, we can offer a full suite of solutions and services from edge to core to cloud.
Our most successful partners deeply understand the full suite of offerings Zayo provides and where these solutions and services fit in with their customers. Whether the end customer is a mid-size enterprise with limited staff looking to outsource time-consuming IT tasks or a large enterprise with an IT team larger than that mid-sized company, Zayo has a wide variety of solutions suited to every enterprise.
Expanding awareness of our full solution suite hasn’t been without challenges. We still hear from partners today that Zayo doesn’t serve their customers because we just sell fiber. One of our goals at this year’s Channel Partners conference and beyond is to spread awareness of our entire portfolio beyond just fiber. We never again want to hear a partner say “We didn’t know Zayo did that” when talking about a full suite of enterprise solutions – including voice!
We’ve Expanded Our Managed Services Suite
This year is especially exciting for Zayo as we unveil a broader portfolio of managed services offerings. This offering is important because it expands what Zayo and our partners can do, satisfying the needs of nearly every enterprise out there.
In a rapidly changing and increasingly complex technology landscape, IT services are increasingly critical and IT teams are taking on far broader roles than they were a decade ago. We’re seeing more and more enterprises ask for managed service offerings to help supplement strapped IT teams and enable them to refocus their efforts on mission-critical tasks.
Now, we offer managed services across a wider range of our offerings including Managed LAN. Our Managed LAN solution is an exciting offering because now we’re able to offer comprehensive network solutions down to individual devices and users. Not only can we connect between sites, we can connect within them now, too.
Zayo has gone from offering traditional infrastructure and connectivity solutions to adding edge, voice, and managed services in just five years. Now we have a full suite of proven technologies that customers use every day – this should instill the confidence in our partners to sell these solutions even more.
Let’s Make 2025 the Year of the Channel
If there’s one thing I hope our partners walk away from Channel Partners 2025 with, it’s that Zayo remains steadfast in our commitment to the channel. With more team members and investment in the channel than ever before, we’re well-positioned to help our channel partners win with our comprehensive suite of networking solutions.
This year at Channel Partners, we can’t wait to engage with some of our long-time partners and rekindle relationships with those who may not understand our full portfolio of solutions and services yet or haven’t sold Zayo solutions in a while. We are also excited to build new partner connections.
Now’s the time to begin selling Zayo’s solutions. With an expanded portfolio, proactive investment, and a commitment to your success, Zayo will be your premier partner in selling networking solutions from edge to core to cloud in 2025.