By Khali Henderson

Concentric, a business unit if XO Communications, is launching an indirect sales channel to sell its new Concentric Cloud Solutions, including cloud-based virtualization, content acceleration, and interactive contact center solutions for businesses. In addition, the Concentric Cloud solutions will be available through XO indirect sales channel.

Concentric is officially announcing the launch of its partner program, though it has been doing the trade show circuit for the past few months to generate interest from agents and VARs. The XO business unit has tapped Rich Farbman as the channel manager responsible for growing the Concentric channel and interfacing with the existing XO channel management team.

“Day one, he has the resources to draw from,” said Eric Hyman, director of product management and marketing communications for Concentric Cloud Solutions. These resources include sales and engineering support as well as a budget to hire geographically assigned channel managers.

Channel partners can sell XO services by becoming a Concentric agent or an XO agent. Existing XO agents automatically have access to selling the Concentric product line without any modifications to their agent agreements.

The reason for the separation of the channels goes back to the branding decision, keeping the telecom and cloud offers separate. There are some indirect sales partners that want to sell cloud that may not want to sell traditional carrier services, said Hyman. In addition, he said it enables XO and Concentric to go after nontraditional sales partners like ISVs to sell through.

Furthermore, it allows the company to sell Concentric Cloud Solutions beyond the XO geographic footprint.

Significantly, the Concentric Cloud Solutions will include a unified user interface through which they can provision and manage their services. This will be extended to partners to manage services on their customers’ behalves.