Working in tandem with Presidio, Level 3 will leverage equipment from industry hardware vendors such as ADTRAN, Cisco, Fortinet and Riverbed Technology in support of its managed services solutions for enterprise and government customers.
The partnership with Presidio will allow Level 3 to streamline its fulfillment, provisioning, management and repair of customer premise equipment-based services, including managed router, firewall, and wide area network (WAN) optimization.
"As most enterprises rethink their network architecture to support virtualization and cloud-based services, many will make the strategic decision that running networking hardware is not critical to ongoing revenue generation," Ted Chamberlin, research vice president at Gartner Inc., said in a media statement. "Many will look to their incumbent carrier, infrastructure and IT services partners to provide that level of ongoing configuration and change management with aggressive, but relevant, service-level agreements."
The services will be available for sale through the company's indirect sales channels. "There is a definite demand for these types of services, and many of our partners already do offer some of these themselves," said Russell Shriver, vice president of data and IP services for Level 3. "However, there is also a range [of our partners] that don't offer any of these, and this
gives them the ability to now broaden their own portfolio as they sell into their accounts."
"What this partnership will now help them do is add incremental value that will make it more relevant to the customer, satisfying a broader need for those enterprises," he added.