Adam Edwards, CEO of Telarus, interviews Ross Artale, CEO of Spectrotel, regarding the acquisition of AireSpring. Artale explains that the two businesses are highly complementary with less than 20% overlap in selling partners, allowing the combined entity to serve a range from mid-market to enterprise clients. He discusses Spectrotel’s evolution from a regional POTS aggregator to a managed service provider, noting that the company grew from $25,000,000 to $210,000,000 at the time of the AireSpring deal. Artale highlights that approximately 80% of future investments will focus on managed services, service delivery assurance, and creating centers of excellence. Finally, he emphasizes that Spectrotel operates on a 100% channel-based model, prioritizing relationships with advisors and partners like the Telarus ecosystem.
Video Transcript
Transcript is auto-generated.
Welcome everyone. I’m Adam Edwards, CEO of Telarus. And today, my guest is Ross Artale, CEO of Spectrotel. Ross, welcome to the show.
Adam, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Alright. So, obviously, the big news we wanna talk about is your recent acquisition of AireSpring. AireSpring, of course, a very large supplier partner of Telarus. Spectrotel, also a great supplier of Telarus.
Bringing these two together obviously creates a large company, but that wasn’t the reason you brought them together. Tell me, what is bringing these companies together do for you?
You know, these two businesses are so complementary to one another. There’s virtually very little overlap in terms of selling partners. There’s less than 20%.
And AireSpring has a long tradition of selling, you know, strong fiber connectivity, unified communications. They have mobility. They have global connectivity.
They have a soft switch. Just a lot of great assets. Spectrotel is the best in the world at providing integrated services to distributed enterprises. So dual broadband connectivity, full managed service stack, very strong AI ops enabled platform. These two things together are very powerful because we’re serving different customers, different types of partners, and all that together means we’re serving everything from mid market to enterprise, all forms of connectivity, very strong managed services, you know, mobility, global connectivity. It’s a very powerful platform.
Yes. I I want people to understand you, Ross. You know, Telarus historically grew up with AireSpring. You know, we formed the business.
They had recently formed theirs, partnered with them for many, many years, both being somewhat West Coast oriented. A lot of Telarus partners have sold with AireSpring but unfamiliar with Spectrotel. And I think it’s important to get your background, which is somewhat similar. You’ve been in this game for a long time.
Can you talk about how you started at Spectrotel and and then kind of the acceleration that that you got later?
Yeah. So I’ve been in telecom for thirty two years.
I joined Spectrotel twenty years ago. We were a regional CLEC providing POTS lines to small businesses, And we took the business from 25,000,000 to 210,000,000 at the time of the deal with AireSpring. And we’ve evolved throughout the course of, you know, the history from a POTS aggregator to an Internet aggregator into a managed service provider.
We were acquired by Grain Management about three and a half years ago.
We were also a founder based business very similar to AireSpring, and I think the the the main difference in a private equity backed business is the level of investment. You know, an an entrepreneur, it’s… You know, sometimes it’s a lifestyle business and there’s investment being made, but it’s it’s always built differently. And in private equity, you know, we’re building business cases.
We’re pouring capital into the business and and driving growth. And this is very much a scaled growth platform, and so we can expect significant investments inside of service excellence, managed services, our technology.
We did that with Grain in our first go around, and the results speak for themselves. We we delivered AI enabled automation. We built a a network intelligence center platform.
We drove double digit growth. We outpaced the market forex. And it’s just… You know, it’s very compelling. It’s… You know, they’re both great ways to grow, and I’ve had the opportunity now to do that as a as a entrepreneur and now also in a private equity business, and that’s a lot of excitement as an operator.
Well, I gotta tell from my side, it’s been obvious that, you know, Graeme came and invested. You started investing in talent. I saw leadership. I saw quite a bit of investment. Where are those investments going today?
So about 80% of that will continue inside the realm of managed services and service delivery assurance, you know, all… Everything to do with creating these centers of excellence. You can expect us… You know, we we grew up grew up in… As an aggregator, and now there’s a distinct difference between aggregation and being a a managed network service provider. Aggregators, you know, provide Internet connectivity across many suppliers, but a managed network provider manages the control plane of the network, which means the the policies of the network, the security of the network, and the connectivity with managed services are now synonymous. That’s that’s one thing to an IT organization. So all of our investments are really centered around providing better outcomes for our customers, which means better performance, better uptime, better security, and also better experience for our partners.
Great. Well, speaking of partners, I think it’s important for them to know, we of course know this from partner of both of you, those that don’t know, your internal channel approach. What percentage of your business goes through the channel?
It’s a 100% channel based. It’s something that both businesses are very proud of.
It’s everything to us. You know, that we don’t take that for granted, our relationship with Telarus and our advisers. It’s what keeps the fuel running, and it’s really what serves… You know, drives us every day to provide great outcomes because the relationship and partnership with our advisers are sort of almost more important than some of the customer relationships because if we’re not managing our customers properly, we’re not gonna get new new sales. So it definitely keeps us on our toes. We have to earn that business every day.
Yeah. You know, I think that’s the kind of litmus for me when I know a channel oriented company. You can hear them just what you said. A happy advisor is worth a 100 customers. And so that customer is really the after effect of a great channel approach. And you guys have got that on both sides, that great legacy that you continue.
Final comments I’ve always said, like…
Oops. Sorry. You know, this business is so simple. If you serve customers well, partners will give us business. And if we’re not, they won’t. There’s plenty of choice. So we don’t take that for granted.
Absolutely. Final comments. Anything… Any message you wanna leave with our partners?
I really just wanna reach out to the Telarus ecosystem. I’ve long admired AireSpring. They have… They’re so deeply rooted inside of of the Telarus ecosystem, and I just want everyone to know we’re gonna be bigger. We’re gonna be better, stronger. We’re gonna bring an amazing enablement and products to you and your customers and just really look forward to engaging directly.
Fantastic. Ross, thank you so much for your time, for the partnership. Congratulations on this great transformative deal.
Thank you so much, Adam. I appreciate it.
Thanks, everyone.