People

KB: The reason I joined GTT tells the story of where it is today. To me, it starts with people. That’s what hooked me into coming on board here. Jim Delis, who has several weeks’ head start on me, took over as the president of the Americas. Jim has a tremendous history in the channel and the industry. He ran XO’s sales, including the channel. He started up and built up the Time Warner Cable channel program. He dealt with all the national and regional players in the space. We had an opportunity to work together at our last company, where he came in and helped us take our program national. We were more of a regional player at the time. We peered together and worked hand-in-hand on the channel and focused top-down, bottoms-up in working with the partner community – the selling partners, the [TSB] partners – and helping evangelize what we did.

So I know Jim well. We have the same train of thought on the channel. We don’t disagree on how to run a channel and what’s needed in the channel and the resources the partners are looking for. He asked me to come in and help him take over the channel here at GTT. When I looked around, I thought, ‘For starters, it’s an established channel program and has a good reputation from that standpoint.’