We’re a little over a week into 2019, and the storylines are already shaping up.

New hires for Fusion Connect and Infovista indicated where the companies are trending, and a Fuze sales leader offered up his five trends for the channel in 2019.

Some of these storylines feel like part of a time-honored tradition: carriers and their conflict. CenturyLink faces another FCC probe, and AT&T has been trading words with its good friends at the union.

All of those stories made it into our list of this week’s most-read articles. Give it a look, dear readers, and enjoy your weekend!

7. Windstream Builds Out Kinetic Fiber Internet Services

The CLEC is hooking up rural SMB customers with new fiber access.

Windstream said the ongoing expansion of its Kinetic internet fiber service will help one-third of customer locations access gig services. The previous number was 1 percent.

The company’s vice president of sales told us that Windstream partners can sell the Kinetic brands in 16 states.

Edward Gately landed the scoop for us.

6. Avaya Makes Edge Program Changes to Drive 2019 Sales

Avaya tweaked its Edge partner program to eliminate complexity, its Achilles heel by admission.

The company simplified the program requirements and documentation and adopted a calendar-year schedule to align with its partners’. But the change people will find most compelling is new rebate dollars rewarding the sale of new Avaya unified-communications or contact-center offerings.

Learn about the discussions that led up to these changes.

5. Infovista Taps SAP Alum as New CEO in Growth Initiative

The SD-WAN vendor hired José Duarte as its new CEO, citing his ability to help businesses scale.

Duarte worked on Infovista’s board for the last two years, and his multiple-decade career includes stints in leadership roles at various organizations around the globe.

He replaced Philippe Ozanian, the company’s CEO since 2008. Ozanian helped push Infovista into SD-WAN and 5G efforts, and he will take an advisory role during the next stage of growth.

Learn more about Infovista.

4. Fusion Hires Ex-CenturyLink Channel Exec to Lead National Partners

We read about a few CenturyLink channel heads who left for new pastures in 2018; this week saw another.

Cloud services provider Fusion Connect tasked Armando Martinez with overseeing its master-agent relationships, among other duties. Martinez most recently worked for CenturyLink’s Channel Alliance and moved up to chief of staff for the program.

Read about his new role.

3. Top Channel Program Trends for 2019

Fuze‘s director of North American channel sales spilled his insights for the upcoming year.

J.P. Dundas labeled 2018 the year “digital transformation reigned as king” in his recent blog for Channel Partners. He prognosticated that disruption will hit the channel anew, and he shared five major trends he sees — one being the “rise of the app generation,” and how that generation’s entrance into the workforce is going to make waves.

Read his blog to see the rest of the trends.

2. CenturyLink CEO Blames Equipment Vendor for Outage Affecting ‘Relatively Small Percentage’

We wrote last week about the CenturyLink outage that caused 911 calls to drop nationwide. Now the telco giant has a rebuttal.

President and CEO Jeff Storey said at the 2019 Citi Global TMT West Conference that the problem had two sources: “a particular equipment vendor” and …

… a malfunctioning network management card. The unnamed U.S. vendor is a longtime facet of CenturyLink’s network.

The FCC announced an investigation into the matter, as did Washington state’s attorney general.

Read more about the outage.

1. AT&T Workers Bracing for More Job Cuts

A labor dispute with Ma Bell is also sure to draw eyeballs.

Not all of the news with AT&T is union-related as much as it is workforce-related. Edward Gately reported that AT&T will lay off more employees in a “geographic rationalization” and “employment surplus reduction.”

But the Communications Workers of America (CWA) laid into AT&T for cutting more than 10,000 workers since celebrating the passing of federal tax cuts in December 2017.

Read about the layoffs and the union’s gripes.