Following EarthLink’s recent announcement about a partnership with Independence IT to improve EarthLink’s portfolio with cloud workspace and overall application virtualization capabilities, we had a chance to discuss EarthLink’s evolution. The company has quickly evolved from being a dial-up ISP into a managed communications and IT services provider with a robust portfolio targeting the SMB and enterprise market: in 2010, only 25% of EarthLink’s revenue came from businesses, but in 2011 about 71% of the company’s $1.3 billion in revenues came from business services.
Following EarthLink’s recent announcement about a partnership with IndependenceIT to improve EarthLink’s portfolio with cloud workspace and overall application virtualization capabilities, we had a chance to discuss EarthLink’s evolution. The company has quickly evolved from being a dial-up ISP into a managed communications and IT services provider with a robust portfolio targeting the SMB and enterprise market: in 2010, only 25% of EarthLink’s revenue came from businesses, but in 2011 about 71% of the company’s $1.3 billion in revenues came from business services.
Much of EarthLink’s shift has come from a series of acquisitions, but the company has also showed it can also bolster its portfolio with partnerships. In the case of its announced partnership arrangement with IndependenceIT, EarthLink will white label the IndependenceIT offering, packaging these offerings on a wholesale basis with other EarthLink services. EarthLink will also manage their own customer relationships including installation, billing and post installation care.
Under the arrangement, the IndependenceIT environment is hosted within the EarthLink data center, allowing for seamless connectivity for the EarthLink customer as well as other clients that Independence IT’s distribution channels serve. EarthLink has a full suite of IT services including data center, virtualization, applications, security, and connectivity and managed services, and plans to officially launch these new services available through this partnership in the second quarter of 2012.
According the EarthLink’s CMO Barbara Dondiego, her company “supports customers through multiple distribution channels including direct sales teams located in over 60 markets throughout the East Coast as well as nationally focused teams. Overlay support resources are deployed to ensure additional solution development expertise is available to all types of customers in key areas including MPLS networking, Security Services, Cloud Computing, Voice Equipment, and Hosted Voice.”
Our observation: with competition for managed communications and IT services heating up, it looks to us like EarthLink has become a force to be reckoned with.
