Dive Brief:
- NWN intends to leverage an industrywide hardware refresh and spending shift to deliver its new network-as-a-service offering.
- The subscription-based Intelligent Connectivity NaaS offering, announced Jan. 22, integrates with the HPE Mist network operations platform and bundles hardware, software, cloud and carrier services into a single bill.
- NWN CEO Jim Sullivan said the offering responds to rising network strain from return-to-office and high-capacity workloads. “It could be equivalent to what we saw in the internet build-out, or equivalent to what we saw in the cloud build-out or application economy build-out,” Sullivan told Channel Dive. “Now we're in this AI-ready economy where you have to have the traffic be managed appropriately,”
Dive Insight:
The NaaS offering is emblematic of NWN’s long journey from a value-added reseller focused on communications hardware to a business that generates more than 80% of its revenue on a recurring basis.
The Massachusetts-based channel partner closed approximately $1.3 billion in revenue last year, buoyed in part by momentum in customer experience software, cybersecurity and network, CEO Jim Sullivan told Channel Dive. The firm had about $250 million in sales pre-pandemic, before riding a wave of cloud migration momentum over the last seven years.
Historically known as a top reseller and supporter of Cisco unified communications hardware, NWN has grown its volume with hyperscalers such as AWS and cybersecurity vendors like Palo Alto Networks. The company has also profited from relationships with cloud-based CX providers, winning Five9’s 2025 U.S. Partner of the Year.
The company evolved its routes to market, in addition to its technology. NWN expanded on its reseller roots by layering managed services, professional services and software into its offerings. It has also used the agency sales model to cover gaps in its resale footprint, recently earning Strategic Partner of the Year honors from Intelisys.
The company has also built its own intellectual property, creating virtual agents that it layers into its contact center software. Sullivan said NWN has started to function as a vendor to other channel partners, who lack its full CX resources.
“We have several partners that are reselling our solutions and agents taking the solutions out that we are delivering. Large integrators that are doing that as well. So I think it's an area where we’re definitely a leader,” Sullivan said. “It is not necessarily like we're competing with everybody. We really can create these solutions that partners can take to the market with their install base.”
As customers approach refresh cycles for their networking equipment, vendors are keen to upgrade them to AI-ready infrastructure — and platforms that can be consumed on a subscription model. Sullivan said customers are eager for a NaaS model that flattens their costs into a monthly subscription.
“This is much more a reaction to customers and the marketplace than any competitor doing it,” he said. “But I do recognize that there's a lot of partners out there that are just really clinging on to reselling hardware. It's not what we're doing. If a customer says, 'Hey, we really have this need for X, Y, X,' we were going to supply the customer with that. But this is mostly customer demand-driven.”
The company now ranks 400th among global partner firms in the Omdia Global Partner 1000.
“They’ve moved beyond being a traditional integrator to becoming an experience-as-a-service platform — stitching together cloud, connectivity, collaboration, and security into a single managed lifecycle,” Jay McBain, chief analyst of Channel Dive sister company Omdia, said in an email.
