American Telesis (News - Alert), a provider of wholesale wide area network solutions, is ramping up its agent program with new learning and selling opportunities.

“The channel is critical to our business, and it has been since day one,” said Heather J. Selbert, vice president of operations at American Telesis. Selbert spoke to TMCnet this week at the Channel Partners event in Las Vegas.

New hire William Kendrick joined American Telesis to help the company with the initiative, including new lunch and learn programs to educate agents, and specific material to bring them up to speed on a managed security solution American Telesis will launch in the second quarter.

The new managed security service will help small and medium businesses install firewalls and other security tools and procedures. The service complements other services offered by American Telesis.

American Telesis aggregates services like T1 circuits and Ethernet private lines from its 80 service provider partners. While other companies selling services focus on pushing their specific products and price points, American Telesis uses a consultative sales approach to match the best solutions with customer needs. The company provides customers whatever WAN connectivity they need, and perform ongoing network maintenance and management of those services as needed.

Over the past two decades American Telesis has built a strong loyalty both with its agents and end customers by offering customized solutions and related customer service designed specifically with customer requirements in mind, Selbert told TMCnet.

Adding to that value proposition for the channel is the fact that American Telesis contracts are simple (80 percent of the markup is kept by agents), and that it’s never changed its contracts with agents or made other changes to the program, “which is very unique in the channel.”