Dive Brief:
- Lumen Technologies eliminated roles in its Global Partner Solutions team as part of broader cuts in its commercial organization early this month, the company confirmed Thursday. Most impacted employees were informed July 1 and are expected to depart the company July 10.
- Approximately 90 individuals from the partner division were cut, including national channel managers and partner success managers, according to a source close to the company. The company will add partner success personnel as it moves its focus away from voice and into network-as-a-service offerings and the newly acquired Alkira portfolio.
- “Lumen continues its transformation to support long-term growth as the trusted network for AI,” the company said in an email. “We are making difficult but necessary changes to align our workforce to business needs and strategic priorities. We recently took steps to further align our commercial resources to Lumen’s goals, including the difficult decision to eliminate certain roles within our Growth organization. ”
Dive Insight:
The layoffs, associated with the Acceleration and Growth team led by EVP and CRO Jeff Sharritts, are the telco's second major workforce reduction this year. Lumen has not filed any WARN notices, suggesting that its cuts do not exceed 50 people in any particular state. However, the approximately 90 impacted GPS personnel spread out across the U.S. represent a significant chunk of Lumen’s channel organization.
Lumen is grappling with a number of challenges. In addition to paying down debts, the company is focused on enterprise and public sector customers and seeing its financial results move accordingly.
Lumen’s Mid-market enterprise revenue declined 10% year over year in Q1 2026, while large enterprise revenue ticked up 1% and public sector increased 5%.
The company is also deemphasizing transactional legacy products, including voice. Lumen will end compensation for new sales of voice. Renewals on voice won’t be compensated moving forward, sources told Channel Dive Thursday. Voice portfolio employees were among those laid off.
In lieu of voice, Lumen is chasing the opportunity to provide connectivity to enterprises and data centers to power AI inference. The company is bullish on East-West network traffic that moves inside of internal networks and data centers, in addition to North-South traffic defined as “premise to anywhere” by Lumen President and CFO Christopher Stansbury.
Stansbury said at a TD Cowen conference May 27 that the acquisition of Alkira will make it the first telco to marry North-South and East-West.
“The point of intersection is multi-cloud gateway,” Stansbury told investors and analysts. “It will work on-net or off-net, in a very programmable way, meaning through one pane of glass, I want to move data from here to here right now, you design your own network, you push go and it works.”
The question for partners, especially agency-based technology advisors and technology services distributors, is if the layoffs represent a new channel strategy. Sharritts and new SVP of Global Partner Solutions Jim Ortbals, both Cisco alumni, bring deep experience with value added resellers and systems integrators. The company has also doubled down on its alliances and technology partnerships teaming with hyperscalers such as AWS and data center providers such as Digital Realty.
The cuts hit the agency side of GPS hard, sweeping across directors, managers and individual contributors. Many of the laid off employees are channel veterans who have lived through various acquisitions.
“Anticipate competitors to pick them up,” JS Group CEO Janet Schijns told Channel Dive. “They didn’t even cut muscle; they cut into the bone of their channel organization.”
CEO Kate Johnson has preached operational efficiency as the company tries to avoid bankruptcy. Lumen has also tapped into automation, leaning on Salesforce agents to increase productivity. Schijns warned, however, that the lower operating expenses derived from the layoffs may not offset the downstream effects of removing people from the partner organization.
The problem is complexity, Schijns said.
“The channel is not a low-touch route to market for a company like Lumen. It depends on experienced people who resolve conflicts, approve deals, navigate pricing exceptions, manage escalations, make systems work, and keep partners productive,” Schijns told Channel Dive in an email. “Those functions are often viewed as overhead, but they are revenue-generating infrastructure. If those capabilities are diminished, partner experience suffers, sales velocity slows, and competitors gain an opening.”
Vendors mistakenly think partners sell out of preference for a product or because they are following financial incentives.
“They don't,” Schijns said. “Partners do not allocate loyalty. They allocate attention and selling capacity. They invest that capacity where they can predictably win. If partners begin to question whether deals will move efficiently, issues will be resolved quickly, or customers will have a positive experience, they naturally shift more of their business elsewhere. That is the long-term risk every restructuring must account for.”
