CP Expo: Aggregators On Partners' Connectivity Strategies

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — A Channel Partners Conference & Expo keynote Wednesday focused on the role of aggregators in partners’ connectivity strategies.

Alistair Edwards, chief analyst at Canalys, moderated the keynote. Panelists included:

Pagliazzo said Granite “embraces” the title of aggregator.

“As a company, we provide managed voice, data and field services across the United States and Canada,” he said. “We have well over 600,000 locations that we support in our aggregation model, 1 million data circuits out there and 1 million POTS sites. To us, aggregation means the opportunity to provide multiple services to partners and their end users so that they can continue grow their business.”

Silber said aggregation is about providing end-to-end solutions for enterprise customers.

“The No. 1 term I hear in every meeting I go to at the leadership level with customers is we want to … consolidate our economic state, the number of resources and people that have as part of how we deliver the service, we want a much more seamless, much more integrated experience,” he said.

The value from an aggregator perspective for partners “has never been greater because they can finally go to one place regardless of what the customer challenge is,” Silber said.

Shaw said the conversations have moved away from bandwidth requirements, which was part of the original perception of aggregators.

“I think we've moved well away from single bill being the biggest piece of a value proposition and moving more towards … business performance, application performance, survivability and security,” she said.

Examining Partners’ Connectivity Strategies

If partners can recognize what their clients are looking for, aggregation allows them to design solutions that will stick and meet their needs, Pagliazzo said.

Shaw said the channel world is becoming broader.

“We're finding new players who come into our space,” she said. “And at Nitel, we look at the segmentation of the partners and how we cooperate with those partners to elevate their position with their customer. We take a huge amount of accountability for our customers, but we know our partner job is to really lift the partner up for their working relationship with their customers. Our customers are our customers, and our partners are our partners.”

Silber said for aggregators, partners are the “pulse of the customer.”

“Are you listening to your customer?” he said. “Is it a capex versus an opex decision, for example, where you have a lot of options? So we count on you to get us that information of what the customer needs.”

Pagliazzo said Granite is willing to customize whatever partners need.

Flexibility and customization are the tenants of the success of the aggregation model, Shaw said.

“Explore the value proposition in aggregation,” she said. “The world of aggregation is uplifting this … very legitimate, highly valued approach to the network.”