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Hello, everyone. Richard Murray, chief commercial officer with Telarus. And today, I am joined by my good friend, Chris Jones, the national VP of partner channels. Chris, welcome.
It’s good to be here, Richard. It’s great to see you.
Let let’s dive right in. I I wanna start with you you came into a channel program that that was established. It’s been there for a long time, but it was in the middle of of change and expansion.
And in in the time that you’ve you’ve been there, what what do you feel has been the biggest thing that you’ve been able to accomplish with GTT?
Yeah. So, Richard, when I when I first joined GTT, one of the things we had a channel program, as you mentioned, but it was a very different channel program than we have right now. And it was really it was a channel program where our channel sales directors, also known as channel managers, were working with partners, but they also had to account manage the customers that the partner sold. So it was it was kind of eighty five percent account manager, fifteen percent channel manager.
And so while we lived in the indirect space, we weren’t a more traditional indirect program. And part of the reason that I joined GTT was we were making this evolution from sort of a niche channel with this unique go to market approach into a more traditional channel where we introduced national channel managers, where we brought focus to the channel sales director role. So instead of having to be both a high a hybrid where I manage partners and I manage customers, we’ve the channel manager gets to manage partners. They get to work strategy with partners.
They get to advocate for what we are doing in to the industry. And then we have enterprise sales directors that are gonna manage the account. So what we really did is we took a program that was it was a good program, and and it was successful for GTT. But for us to do what we wanna do at GTT going forward, we had to I don’t know if mainstream.
If we had but we had to bring a lot of the things that larger channel programs that operate at scale do, And we had to bring that level of maturity to it. So that that’s kind of what we’ve been up to over the first several months that that I’ve been here.
Well, maturity, scale, focus, I think I’ve seen those. But the other really big thing I’ve seen is just a purposeful lean in into the channel. What what’s behind that? What’s what’s the driving force there?
I think what we what GTT realized, and I think part of the realization is what brought Sarah Siegers to GTT. It’s what brought me to GTT afterwards is the power of the channel.
Really, what GTT has come to understand is that, yes, our enterprise salespeople have relationships with customers. But when you’re a brand like GTT, not every customer knows who you are.
And given that we are purpose built for the enterprise customer, a lot of when you think of enterprise customers and you think of the technology partners they work with, a brand like GTT doesn’t stand out. So the best way for us to gain access to those customers, the best way for us to be able position our solutions to those customers was really to embrace the channel. Right? Market research tells everyone that that the enterprise customer, there’s at least seven partners generally working with an enterprise customer. And for GTT to get access to those partners, we had to to really scale up our indirect strategy, and we had to hate to call it grow it up, but we had to grow up, mature, and scale our indirect strategy so that we could really start talking to the partners, making sure the partners understood what is the value of GTT, the changes GTT is making so that as they’re dealing with their customers, GTT became a viable solution that a partner could recommend.
Well, and I’ve I’ve really seen it and felt it from leadership all the way down. And so it it’s been just an incredible couple of months as as we’ve seen some of those things take place and and that that lean in occur.
Look, you and I go back quite a ways. Given your history, I believe you had a lot of choices about where you could go. Was there something unique about GTT that that had you say, hey. This is where I wanna be.
Yeah. And and, Richard, when when when I left the old company, there were a lot of opportunities that that presented themselves to me.
The GTT opportunity really stood out in that, the commitment that GTT was making to the channel and to doing this. And and a lot of the companies that I talked to, some of them felt like the old company that I worked for, and they they were big and they were known names.
But you didn’t necessarily know if there was the commitment to the channel. And so for me, in this sort of second iteration of my career, I wanted to go somewhere that was fully committed, and fully understood what they were getting into. And I think I mentioned it earlier, but if you think about GTT hired Sarah Siegers, and then very quickly thereafter, they hired me. You don’t hire both Sarah and Chris if you’re not serious about investing in the channel.
And and that was something that was really important to me was less words. A lot of people use words that say the channel is important to us. We’re investing in the channel. We understand the channel.
What was impressive to me about GTT was they used the words, but then there were the actions. There were the actions of hiring both Sarah and myself. And then if you think about what we’ve done in the ninety days or so after that, we we hired we kind of rebuilt the channel with some of the biggest names in the industry from a channel manager perspective. And we hired people that are well respected by the partner community, and I think the actions speak a lot louder than the words.
And that’s one of the things that that was attractive to me.
The other thing, very candidly, that was attractive to me about GTT is is the people. Everyone that’s come to GTT is passionate, is really probably best in class in their field, in their specialty, And and we’re really putting together a group of people that are expert in what they do. We have a single mission. We’re purpose built for the enterprise. Everything that we do, everyone that we’ve brought in is a piece of the puzzle to that end game of really doing something that people didn’t think was possible in the enterprise customer space. And and given the flexibility and the nimbleness of GTT, we can we can do some really amazing things in that space.
Well, I love that as a takeaway. I I hope I wanted the advisers to hear and to feel what I’ve been seeing, which is the commitment to the channel and the good people and all those things you talked about.
But earlier, you also talked about the brand and how GTT is seen. I know for a lot of our advisers, many still consider GTT as an international play.
How how are you seeing it now, and and how should advisers be thinking of where GTT is in the marketplace?
Yeah. I think, you know, GTT, as a lot of people know, and and people some people probably know this even better than I do, but GTT is made up of a lot of acquisitions over the years. There were there were thirty plus acquisitions over the years, and each acquisition sort of added to a value proposition. But as we’ve sort of relaunched as a company over the last two years, we’ve really zeroed in in terms of what is our sweet spot. And and our sweet spot is the enterprise customer, geographically diverse, multi location.
Certainly, international is still a complete sweet spot for for us when there’s a lot of suppliers out in the industry that that say they’re an internationally centric company. But when you look at GTT, almost fifty percent of our revenue comes from international customers.
We have twenty seven hundred employees in in in you know, we have employees in twenty five countries around the world. We’re truly a global company with assets all over the world. So global is always always gonna be a part of our sweet spot. But I think what partners are starting to realize is we’re more than just a global play.
That large enterprise distributed customer that’s just in North America, the same value that we bring to the international customer, we bring to the the more North American domestic customer. And so, the real sweet spot, I think, is the enterprise customer that that that data is important to how they run their business.
They’re distributed, and they’re looking for a supplier that is that is enterprise centric. Right? And I think I also when I look at this industry, they’re the big, big suppliers out there that are you measure them in hundreds of billions of dollars or, you know, tens of billions of doll they’re huge. And then there are the suppliers out there that are much smaller.
They’re much nimbler, and and the partner community has done a tremendous amount of business with them. GTT sort of lives in the middle. We’re one of those more nimble suppliers that that operates in what I’ll call the aggregator world. Right?
But at the same point, GTT operates the fourth largest IP backbone in the world, and we are a billion dollar plus company. So we have the financial scale and the scale of a large carrier, but we also have the benefit of being asset light similar to an aggregator so that we’re kind of the best of both worlds. And it’s why you’ll hear us a lot of the times, you’ll hear us talk about being one of one because we have all the benefits of being one of the big carriers, big suppliers, but we also have all the benefits of sort of the smaller, nimbler aggregators. And we’re kind of the only supplier out there, I would argue, in our space that brings both of those together for the benefit of the enterprise customer.
And I think that’s where we’re we’re very unique. And I think that’s why as we’ve relaunched to the channel over the last couple of months, we’ve seen such an incredible reaction and people wanting to have a conversation with us again.
Yeah. And it’s it’s it’s a nice place to be. I do wanna pivot us really quickly to the product conversation.
You know, as you look at the GTT portfolio, how do your solutions stand out and and what makes you you’ve got a couple of unique products. What what should advisers know about?
I think, Richard, the the thing for us and, again, we have three thousand plus last mile providers that we work with. So access last mile access is is really a nonissue.
We we can whoever a customer wants to work with, whoever the whoever the partner thinks is the right last mile, obviously, we’re gonna help optimize it. But what’s unique about our products and our solutions is we’re building solutions, I said it earlier, that’s that’s built for the enterprise. And so what are we doing? What are the pain points of an enterprise customer?
And it and it almost sounds so simple. Right? When I know you and I have over the years talked about how we in this industry make this more complicated than it really needs to be. What GTT is trying to do is think about the enterprise customer and their pain points.
And what are some of their pain points? SOC roles. If you’ve got a if you’re a customer with a thousand locations, what’s the last thing you wanna hear? I gotta do truck rolls to a thousand locations.
I gotta coordinate. I have to have people at those sites. A lot of these enterprise locations where you might be running network is it’s a remote site.
Right? So we’re we’re building solutions that focus on how do we minimize that pain point and how do we do minimize the number of truck rolls per location over the next ten years. Right? And then at the same point, once we have that that technology there, that network installed, it’s the management of the network, and it’s the management of all the solutions you might wanna have at the edge and all of the technology providers you might wanna have at the edge.
How do we provide a piece of hardware that allows an enterprise customer to not continue to do truck rolls when they wanna change out technology solutions at the edge at their various locations? How do they want it when they wanna see end to end across I’m not saying there’s a lot of customers out there, but say you’re a customer that has three thousand last mile providers and you have a core network in the middle. How do you see from end to end across all those customers? And that’s what GTT is is provisioning.
We have it’s called the Envision Box. I I wouldn’t suggest you talk to me about that, but we’ve got all the technical resources at GTT to talk to the value of it and what it brings. But in layman’s terms, what really shocked me was how our technology is simplifying the life of the enterprise decision maker that has large cuss large locations, dispersed networks, and management of all of those dispersed networks. And a lot of people talk about boxes and and things that they wanna do in management, but we’re beyond that.
It’s also for us, it’s how do you manage the last mile provider? How do you make sure you can see end to end? What do you do when there’s a maintenance issue? And the solutions that we’re building are designed for that enterprise customer and the pain points that they experience so that this can be a network that you put in.
It’s a managed network. Right? You put it in, and it’s in, and you can count you can rely on it, you don’t have to think about it. Because when I think about technology and I think about what enterprise customers wanna worry about, it’s not the underlying infrastructure.
It’s everything that rides on top of it.
And the what rides on top of it, because of our mark our our go to market approach, you can put a variety of technical solutions on top of our network, but we’re doing it in a way that you minimize truck rolls, you create more visibility into the network, you simplify it, and we, as your underlying network provider and your managed services provider, we become low maintenance.
Right? And you can then focus on the more value added things that sit on top of it and not have to worry about the things that most network providers cause customers to think about.
Well, excellent. I I think it’s in. You don’t have to worry about it. It is a great place for us to finish and wind up. So, Chris, I I thank you so much for joining me here today. I hope all that are our advisers learned something new about GTT.
Thank you for having me, Richard.
That’s all we have here today. Thanks for joining us.