TWC, XO Veteran Takes Key Channel Role at TPx

The newly rebranded TPx Communications has hired a channel veteran who has led teams at Time Warner Cable and XO Communications.

Jim Delis is the company’s new senior vice president of national channel development. He tells Channel Partners that his job will focus on master agents and to help them expand into new markets.

“And I’m going to do that with existing partners with whom we already have existing relationships and contracts, and also to seek out and find some new master agent relationships through partners that we had not done business with in the past but now can due to our national focus,” he said.

He will report to CEO Dick Jalkut.

Delis spent the previous six and a half years with Time Warner Cable, most recently serving as the group vice president of partner channels. He left TWC in June of 2016, a month after Charter purchased the company. Delis says he left because his job at the merged company would have been in a different city and he didn’t want to move his family.

He worked at XO Communications from 1998 to 2010, leading sales, channel marketing, and the company’s business partner channel in various roles. Delis says the time spent at his previous employers will help him in his current job.{ad}

“The experience at both … XO and Time Warner Cable gave me not only an appreciation for channel partners and how important they to telecommunications and IT solutions, but it helped me to really learn how intricate and complex their businesses are, how different the needs of channel partners are than direct sales forces, and over the course of time I’ve adapted my strategies on how to be successful with partners,” he said.

Delis says that as he interviewed with TPx – then known as TelePacific – he learned about the company’s plan to shift from being a regional CLEC to a national managed service provider.

“We’re no longer focusing on the connection part of the business,” Ken Bisnoff, senior vice president of strategic opportunities, told Channel Partners last month. “We’re focusing on managed services for customers and really leveraging that suite of unified communications, managed IT [and] complex WAN solutions that now transform boundaries and enable us to service/support customers with the quality and reliability and accountability that people know and trust in us.”

Delis was impressed with the rebranded company’s vision for the channel.

“The company, more than any company I’ve ever seen, focuses on its growth through the channel,” he said. “Channel partners are the primary growth engine for the organization, and the knowledge that the entire company possesses on how to work with and help channel partners be successful is more part of the DNA of this company than any that I’ve been with.”

Delis started his new job with TPx on Monday.