Windstream Lifts Direct-Only Sales of Data Center Services

CHANNEL PARTNERS Windstream (Booth 2005) has lifted direct-only sales of some of its key data center products.

The service provider said this week at the Spring 2013 Channel Partners Conference & Expo that channel partners now are able to sell colocation, dedicated servers, Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and unified email management through certified channel managers. Windstream earlier this month put about half of its channel managers through data center certification training; they then trained their agents and started selling Windstream data center services on Feb. 25.

More channel managers and agents will take the training this summer. Windstream said it plans to expand the selection of data center products its agents and VARs may sell.

The addition of these products to our partners portfolios will allow them to offer their customers a more robust Windstream solution from the network all the way out to the cloud,” said Don Perkins, senior vice president of business marketing for Windstream. The data center products they will now sell are complementary to the solutions they have already been offering; its a great fit. The extension of our relationship will be mutually beneficial.”