Although Verizon Business has had channel partners since its creation, it has not consistently elevated the centrality of their role. Witness to this is the fact that the company recently held the first channel update for industry analysts in 10 years. 

With the emergence of the AI era, the company is now choosing to scale its ecosystem to be a significant growth engine in areas such as 5G FWA (a low latency wireless technology offering speeds similar to fibre optic connections), Mobility and IoT. 

Mark Tina, Channel Chief and VP Indirect Partner Sales for Verizon led that first analyst briefing in a decade to explain how Verizon is closing the API capabilities gap and automating the vast majority of deal flows with a goal to make the company the easiest partner to do business with.

According to Tina, who has led direct sales for most of his career, one of the problems the Verizon ecosystem had was that it was fragmented across different Verizon business units. He continued:

Three years ago, I moved to indirect sales distribution for Verizon Business. Our customers are choosing to do business with partners more than ever before and so we need to ensure those partners are doing business with Verizon. We needed to pull the channel together into one organisation and so I built the business cases to do this. Late last year, the decision was made to pull the channel into one organisation.

Such a change requires a lot of internal transformation to get all the stakeholders on board. Tina says that because of his 20-year career at Verizon this was easier than it might have been as people already knew him. He made sure to explain to Finance why the change made sense in terms of margins and customer outcomes. He also worked with the marketing and product organisations to find champions to work with him. He said that whenever he ran into nay-sayers he used data to prove his point. Within six months there was a cultural shift within Verizon and an understanding that they needed a unified indirect channel to provide end-to-end integrated solutions and reach buyers that Verizon cannot reach on its own.

In order to build external relationships with partners Tina conducted a lot of face-to-face meetings, as well as getting feedback from Verizon’s partner forum representing over 7,000 indirect partners. A Voice of the Partner program was also set up, mirroring Verizon’s Voice of the Employee Program. The Voice of the Partner program confirmed that Verizon was difficult to do business with because of siloed operations and that the company should be more competitive on pricing in certain areas, as that would help growth. Based on this feedback Verizon decided on its pivots and was transparent about whether input would be taken forward or not.

In response to partner feedback Verizon expanded middle management and revamped the leadership in the new unified channel unit. The role of Channel Chief was elevated to report directly to the CEO of Verizon Business, Kyle Malady. As Tina explains:

The CEO is coming to meet partners with me, and partners really like this. Kyle comes back, sends a quick note about how we are going to work with a said partner. And things happen very quickly. I am now also sitting in all the senior management meetings which helps create an understanding of the channel’s capability within the company.” Furthermore, preferred partners get executive access if there is a problem.

One problem area was the deal registration process which Tina says:

In certain flows was taking over 40 days. Due to automation this has now been cut by more than half, and the goal is to get deal registration completed in real-time.

At the beginning of 2026 Verizon completed its acquisition of pure-play fibre network operator Frontier. Fibre is a critical part of providing global infrastructure for AI solutions. Following the acquisition Verizon now has a fibre footprint in 20 states across the US. The Frontier channel organisation will be moving into Tina’s channel operation to enable cross-selling and up-selling motions, since lots of businesses that have Frontier fibre do not have Verizon mobility services.

In the next 12 to 24 months Tina says that the channel will come into play more than ever before from a services standpoint in delivering cybersecurity and SaaS, and so “we become the IT department for partner managed services as we support their vertical expertise in areas such as energy, distribution and healthcare.”

With the autonomous network that Verizon is architecting using 33,000 employees trained in Claude, Verizon will be better able to fix problems remotely at speed, which means that many channel partners will need to focus less on infrastructure and more on the delivery of managed digital services.

Diginomica estimates the target annual revenue generated by partners under the new unified channel approach to be around seven percent to eight percent of overall revenue for Verizon Business. This relatively low proportion of revenue contribution probably explains why the channel has not had a high internal profile for a long time. However, as Tina pointed out during the briefing, 70% of Verizon Business IoT revenue comes from indirect sales. And, if, as some believe, we are poised for a major expansion of physical AI for IoT, the criticality of the partner play comes sharply into focus for telcos such as Verizon that are investing in the network infrastructure to support this capability.