Zayo Expands Channel Program, Partner Incentives

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CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — Zayo Group (booth #8058 and a Featured Sponsor) is diving deeper into the channel.

The company announced Tuesday that it will launch new incentive programs for its partners and continue to offer training, lead generation and account programs.

Grant Burchfield has been promoted to serve as vice president of indirect sales.

“Our channel partners provide unique value, with the skill, knowledge and experience to ensure our mutual customers maximize their communications infrastructure,” Burchfield said. “My dedicated focus is to strengthen relationships with our partners in order to best serve our customers.”

Burchfield tells Channel Partners that his company has been increasing the scope of its product set and the verticals it reaches. Expanding the product set means moving “beyond point-to-point bandwidth and internet connections” to more integrated infrastructure solutions for an increasing number of industries that need them.

For example, Zayo launched an SD-WAN solution earlier this year to accommodate an increasingly diverse set of user locations and access options. Burchfield says the technology has been a prime opportunity for Zayo partners.

“Some customers are already in the midst of adopting the technology, and others are trying to solve for the use-case application,” Burchfield said. “[It’s] actually really good for us from the partner-community perspective, because a lot of our partners are very well versed in SD-WAN, and most importantly, they know how customers out there in the field are using SD-WAN today.”

Burchfield says Zayo leadership sees opportunity in the indirect channel. He mentioned President and Chief Operating Officer Andrew Crouch, Chief Revenue Officer Phil Mottram and Vice President of Global Reach Bruce Garrison as big proponents of the channel.

“The four of us combined all come from various strong channel community environments or partnership environments and recognize the opportunity ahead of us to serve Global 5000 companies that have deep and large bandwidth needs across our footprint,” he said.

Burchfield says Zayo prides itself for being an independent provider that can stay neutral while advising and supporting partners and customers.

“We view our independence and dedicated focus on communications infrastructure as ways that make us more customer-focused and agile,” he said.

Zayo announced on Monday that it will launch its first data center in the United Kingdom. Zayo acquired Integra for $1.42 billion in 2017 to bolster its fiber portfolio on the West Coast.