Windstream Partner Program Rising like a Phoenix to transform and empower the channel
Making changes to capitalize on a transformative market The only constant in our business is change. To help support the success of our valued channel partners and the needs of our customers, we ve made some changes at Windstream. Raising the bar for ourselves, to capitalize on transformative changes in our space. Whether you re new to the Windstream Channel Program, or you re familiar with it and perhaps a bit skeptical from days past, we invite you to read on. Learn how our new program is designed to be different and to join us. What s changed about Windstream? Heading into 2018, Windstream has already made major changes from the ground up. Including two important acquisitions to bolster our offering in rapidly growing and lucrative markets SD-WAN and UCaaS along with new product introductions, and new marketing support that speaks to customer need. On top of that, we ve changed the Partner Program in a number of important ways. We ve even established a new business unit, Cloud & Connectivity, to combine the resources of our previously disparate Enterprise, Small Business and Wholesale markets, to step out front of the transformation we see taking place in the market around us. Why Windstream? Why now? The Windstream Channel Program is different from what our partners may have experienced in 2015 and 2016. Simply stated, we re taking the program to a much higher level to benefit our partners and customers alike.
A glimpse of changes happening at Windstream Renewed commitment to the channel Product differentiation (right to win) We ve amplified our focus on the partner and customer experience from the CEO to the Channel Manager (and everyone in between) for businesses of all sizes, including SMB. As mentioned above, Windstream owns two of the hottest solutions in two hot and fast growing categories that are highly relevant to customer need. Our SD-WAN Concierge and OfficeSuite UCaaS offerings, combined with our nationwide capability and experience puts Windstream and our channel partners in a class above all others. Operational excellence/ease of doing business/accountability Our renewed focus on the channel has led to significant progress in the operational support aspects of our business. We re streamlining everything from quoting deals, to install intervals, to repair and escalations. We have aggressive targets in place to continue improvements and will be sharing our progress directly with our partner community on a regular basis. Best-in-class network Our $3 billion investment in our network over the past 3 years has generated unprecedented performance gains in reliability, efficiency, coverage, and scale. It s an investment that pays off for everyone, and our partners have a front row seat at the table.
Empowering you to rise to meet customer needs Got your interest? So that s just a taste of what we re doing to change things up to benefit the channel. Here s a slightly deeper dive to help bring our transformation into greater perspective. Renewed commitment to the channel In such a dynamic environment, IT leaders look to their own partners, organizations like you, to help them navigate change and manage their IT investments wisely. So we ve remade our Channel Program to empower you to rise to meet customer need and expectations. That includes a maniacal focus on reducing churn, and increasing sales and profitability. We re aligning our customer base and our customer advocates by partner in order to streamline the engagement process and foster better partnerships. We re aligning resources across the customer lifecycle to ensure customers receive the right level of care and support based on their size and complexity. Active efforts and campaigns have been introduced with our partners to ensure customers are using the most effective technologies matched to current and future business need. We re proud of these efforts and advancements already in place, including: Windstream s Channel Program is truly reborn. We re excited about the collective opportunities IT transformation presents us, and about our trusted relationships, and we look forward to capitalizing on them with you; Our Partners, Our Colleagues, Our Friends. Recently appointed, Brian Crotty and Donna Wenk as President and Vice President, respectively, of Customer Experience and Advocacy. Their extensive experience with the partner channel enables them to lead efforts to always keep our partners top of mind. Proactive efforts to refresh and renew customers prior to contract expiration. Keeping customers current with new technologies has reduced churn by 50%, doubling the average length of a customer tenure; thereby locking in partner residual commissions longer. Generated $3M of incremental base upsell revenue in 2017, yielding $500K in partner commissions. Developing OfficeSuite and SD-WAN certification and training for customer advocates and our partners. 5 WINDSTREAM
Strong team focus on partner and customer experience A commitment that starts at the top Working with Windstream, you ll see our amplified focus on our partners and on customer experience with our entire team. Every layer of the organization is invested in the success of the channel, including Sales, Care and Repair, Ops, Marketing, and everyone else in between. Here s what the Windstream leadership team has to say about our commitment to the channel. We re 100% committed to the channel. We re going to drive success to the channel and want to be the carrier of choice for you. Tony Thomas President & Chief Executive Officer Partners are hearing and seeing our transformation story, they re embracing the change and are optimistic about Windstream s future. We re highly engaged with the channel and recognize its vital role in our future success. Layne Levine President Cloud & Connectivity The channel needs a healthy Windstream, and we need a healthy channel. Windstream is serious about its commitment to the channel and has integrated it into the playbook of the corporate plan. I m excited to be leading the Channel Program. The road ahead is prosperous for both the company and the channel. Curt Allen Senior Vice President Channel Sales WINDSTREAM 6
Operational excellence, ease of doing business and accountability As an industry, communications providers are not routinely applauded for delivering a positive customer experience. Windstream is out to change that, with a major focus on continuous operational excellence. Several initiatives have been put into place to drive significant improvement across key areas, all of which promise to reflect positively on our partners: A single dedicated support channel means no more segmenting customers based on SMB or Enterprise, legacy or non-legacy, etc. Every one of your end users matters to us, and we want to make it easy to do business with Windstream through a simplified structure regardless of who or where they are. Enhanced partner experience with preferred contact triage line and dedicated service delivery project manager. Significant investments to consolidate and simplify systems, tools and processes, with plans in place to do more. Leveraging the best features of the Windstream, EarthLink and Broadview Networks partner portals to create a single, best-in-class partner portal with agile development practices to quickly bring portal features to partners. Operational Excellence A philosophy of the workplace where problemsolving, teamwork, and leadership results in the ongoing improvement in an organization. The process involves focusing on the customers needs, keeping the employees positive and empowered, and continually improving the current activities in the workplace. Bi-monthly scorecards will be in place by 1Q18 providing partners with a view of quarterly performance across key areas, and enhancing accountability to benefit everyone in the process. At Windstream, we re committed to delivering continuous improvements to our quoting experience. cost. 7 WINDSTREAM
Comittment to continuous improvement Operational performance scorecard: accountability Windstream is focused on delivering key performance and accountability improvements and the numbers prove we re delivering against our promises. PERFORMANCE METRIC 3Q 2017 4Q 2017 1Q 2018 CDDD 65% 70% 80% OFFICESUITE (ADDING NEW LOCATIONS) 25 DAYS 3-5 DAYS 3-5 DAYS SD-WAN TURN UP* 40 DAYS 30 DAYS 20 DAYS SERVICE LEVEL 70% 75% 80% *SD-WAN (no access) CDDD = Customer Desired Due Date Serious about ease of doing business Windstream acknowledges a not so distant past of being difficult to do business with. Our move to reinvent our future resulted in changes in corporate strategy, strategic acquisitions and movement of support personnel. With a strong strategic direction in place, our business has positively shifted toward building a Channel Program that thrives on being easy to do business with. Positive improvements have already taken place, including; Unified, national Channel Program. Quoting, ordering, partner lifecycle management, commissions, training and education are all under single leadership for all three of our prior legacy companies (Windstream, EarthLink and Broadview Networks). 250+ talented professionals dedicated to channel support structure; inclusive of 40 SE s and Principle Solutions Architects, 40 quote and order support and 60 customer channel advocates. Four channel focused, established Right to Win areas to focus the Channel Program and partners on key categories/opportunities where Windstream holds unique competitive differentiation and advantage. Overhauling and improving all aspects of the quote to contract experience, from one end to the other. Reduced quoting intervals by 50%+ in the past 30 days; averaging 3-5 days for the majority of quotes. On track to achieve further interval reductions by 1Q18. WINDSTREAM 8
Product differentiation: Windstream s right to win Windstream s vision is to provide our customers and partners with best in breed technology solutions that address today s critical business initiatives. These include solutions aligned with cloud adoption, CX/customer experience initiatives, and security. We believe our sense of focus is critical. Partners have previously identified Windstream as the all things provider having something for everyone. While it makes for a great broad stroke marketing line, it s not a good business position. So we audited our strengths and weaknesses and determined we d focus on four key areas where we believe Windstream is uniquely positioned as the carrier of strength, we call them our Right to Win Scenarios. Distributed retail, healthcare, banking and service enterprises investing in the customer experience SD-WAN as a service, businesses in states of cloud adoption UCaaS and CCaaS across all business sizes On-net capacity to meet bandwidth demands Windstream maintains a robust solutions portfolio ideally aligned with our Right to Win strategy, designed to support the growing needs of distributed businesses as they evolve to achieve overall IT and digital business transformation. Windstream s SD-WAN Concierge and OfficeSuite are the best in breed solutions available and resonate in nearly every customer conversation, giving us the ability to truly rock the market. 9 WINDSTREAM
A simplified solutions strategy that resonates well with customer needs While Windstream offers a variety of solutions to enable customers to achieve their own business objectives, we ve organized them in a dramatically simplified way that makes it easy to sell into customer locations across all industries and sizes. We ve done this by organizing them by solutions designed to achieve three key strategic objectives that are also aligned with our previous Right to Win. SOLUTIONS TO Optimize Performance SOLUTIONS TO Engage Customers SOLUTIONS TO Protect Your Business Solutions to optimize application performance and reliability, support IT transformation and cloud adoption and keep pace with constantly growing demand for bandwidth. SD-WAN MPLS VPN Wavelength Services Cloud Connect Diverse Connect Ethernet (VLS, E-LAN) Solutions to engage customers and end users, gaining insight into needs and behaviors, strengthening relationships and delivering a personalized customer experience to build loyalty. OfficeSuite UCaaS CCaaS Secure WiFi & Analytics Solutions to protect your business and customer data, your network, employees and IT assets from the threat of attack, intrusion or theft, and protecting the reputation and value of your organization and brand. Managed Network Security PCI Compliance DDoS Business Continuity Windstream Professional Services support initial assessment, implementation and ongoing monitoring and management. WINDSTREAM 10
Best-in-class network The ability to provide network solutions optimized to deliver a superior customer experience to for our customers that includes improved performance, reliability and security, that offers/supports flexibility, scalability and IT agility, too depends heavily on our own network infrastructure designed to do the same. And to keep on doing it well into the future, regardless of how the business environment evolves and changes. To deliver against this ambitious challenge, Windstream has invested steadily and heavily in modernizing our network to support our accelerated journey towards SDN. To begin the process, over the past three years, we ve invested over $3B in our network and will continue to invest in our quest to create a best-in-class network in the years to come, including: Continued network expansion Improved product portfolio Continued architectural rationalization Reduced cycle times Seattle Portland Minneapolis Salt Lake City Denver Omaha Lincoln Des Moines Cedar Rapids Milwaukee Chicago Grand Rapids Indianapolis Detroit Cleveland Buffalo Akron Pittsburgh Columbus Rochester Bethlehem Ephrata Syracuse Philadelphia Albany Newark Andover Boston Westboorough Westborough New York City Oakland Kansas City St. Louis Louisville Cincinnati Ashland Ashburn Baltimore Washington D.C. San Jose Los Angeles Anaheim Las Vegas Phoenix Albuquerque Oklahoma City Tulsa Little Rock Memphis Nashville Knoxville Birmingham Lexington* Atlanta Greensboro Concord Charlotte Commerce Greenville Richmond Raleigh Virginia Beach Dallas Fitzgerald Austin San Antonio Houston New Orleans Jacksonville Orlando Tampa Fort Lauderdale Miami Windstream Fiber Transport Fiber Expansion POP (point of presence) Fixed Wireless Fixed Wireless with Metro Fiber Expansion * Lexington, KY is not a Fixed Wireless location Windstream is steadily building out our nationwide network which now includes over 150,000 route miles of fiber. 11 WINDSTREAM
Providing the reliability today s customers demand To provide crucial resiliency and reliability, Windstream is committed to continuously focusing on network improvement and reduction in outage impacts and the proof is in the results: YEAR ENTERRPSE AVAILABILITY 2014 99.971% 2015 99.984% 2016 99.984% 2017* 99.988% Network outage events are down approximately 1% year over year 25% year over year reduction in the number of customers impacted by outage events 28% year over year reduction in the number of customer outage minutes *YTD through August 2017 All network metrics measured across the core to the provider edge, both on and off-net. A network designed to meet customer needs across every application need To match the needs of our customers by solution type, our current network delivers on all fronts: Transport (Ultra Long-Haul DWDM) 150,000 ULH, intercity, and metro fiber route miles (EarthLink 16,000 + Windstream 131,000) Software Defined Network Orchestrated Waves solution (SDNow) focusing on intentbased, on-demand automation of wavelength services in a multi-vendor, multi-platform, multi-domain environment SD-WAN + OfficeSuite SD-WAN with UCaaS solution positioned as a next-generation, future-proof product that adds significant value as differentiated product set Access-agnostic product offerings enable the dramatic improvement in competitive positioning across Enterprise and SMB segments IP network Tier 1 nationwide IP network with best in class transit capability enabling next generation layer 3 access methodologies and direct connectivity to cloud based applications and services Extensive provider edge density with increasing diversity options and failover capability Voice network Extensive Voice and VoIP network platform density allowing customers more entry points into the Voice/VoIP network enabling the migration from legacy TDM infrastructure to our consolidated and next generation UCaaS/ VoIP platforms Total of 86 SD-WAN gateways deployed across 9 network locations WINDSTREAM 12
A reminder of changes happening at Windstream Renewed commitment to the channel We re more committed than ever as evidenced by the active participation in the channel by our senior executive team, starting with Tony Thomas our CEO, Layne Levine, President of Cloud & Connectivity and SVP/Channel Chief Curt Allen. Product differentiation (right to win) As mentioned above, Windstream owns two of the hottest solutions in what is arguably the two most relevant service categories today. Our SD-WAN Concierge and OfficeSuite UCaaS offerings, combined with our nationwide capability are second to none. Operational excellence/ease of doing business/accountability We get that we have to be easy to do business with. We ve made massive investments with demonstrable improvement in solution development, quoting and service delivery intervals. Best-in-class network Our $3 billion investment in our network over the past 3 years has generated unprecedented performance gains in reliability, efficiency, coverage, and scale. It s an investment that pays off for everyone, and our partners have a front row seat at the table. Capitalizing on the opportunities ahead, together The pace of transformation and change taking place in business and technology today is unprecedented and challenging to keep pace with. But it also presents huge opportunities. At Windstream, we re committed to taking on those opportunities and to creating the same sorts of opportunities for those in the channel space who share our vision, and commit to working with us. We re hoping you will take on that journey with us. We ve made major investments and commitments to making that journey seamless and easy and profitable. The Windstream Channel Program has truly risen like a Phoenix over the past year, just as our entire company has done. We believe there is a great opportunity for all of us to capitalize on. We invite you to join us to rise to the challenge. windstreambusiness.com 2017 Windstream Communications. All Rights Reserved. 3038 11.17