Sampath Sowmyanarayan took the new role of chief revenue officer for Verizon Business a couple of months ago. He’s responsible for all of Verizon Business’ revenues, which currently amount to about $32 billion per year, out of Verizon’s total revenues of about $120 billion. There are 26,000 Verizon Business employees out of about 132,000 Verizon employees in total. He reports to Verizon Business Group CEO Tami Erwin.
His goal is to grow Verizon Business revenues 4%, or about $1.2 billion, each year.
Verizon Business has four sub-business units: enterprise, small and medium business, public sector and wholesale. Its top revenue generator across all its groups is connectivity, both wireless and wireline. “We serve 97% of the Fortune 500 in a meaningful way,” said Sowmyanarayan.
The company has added a couple of new products for businesses lately: private wireless and fixed wireless access (FWA).
Sowmyanarayan recently spoke at Fierce’s Private Wireless Summit where he talked about how Verizon likes to blend private wireless and mobile edge compute for enterprises. He also answered a question about the possible future conflict between private wireless and network slicing. See the short clip below on that topic. The full interview is available on demand.
About eight months ago, Verizon began offering LTE Home, a fixed wireless access product for consumers. And it began offering a similar FWA product, LTE Business Internet, for small and medium businesses. It has also recently began offering a 5G version of these products in some some markets.
Sowmyanarayan said the business products are similar to the home products, only they are “business grade.” They both “use the LTE network we have and the 5G network we have,” he said. “It’s a common network for FWA and mobility. We’ve always had some kind of connection for broadband through our network.” But he said in last eight months Verizon has “been very aggressive” about FWA.
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While he’s only held the position of chief revenue officer for a short time, Sowmyanarayan said he has three main focus areas for Verizon Business this year. He’s accentuating network-as-a-service (NaaS); helping small and medium businesses make a come-back after Covid; and gaining new government contracts, especially from emergency services organizations.
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Before his promotion, Sowmyanarayan was global enterprise president at Verizon Business. He said he had two big lessons from that role. “The first one is, we have to go and solve the customer pain point,” he said. “The second thing is, you have to lead with kindness and integrity. There’s so much uncertainty today. Kindness is contagious and spreads through an organization very quickly. I think the pandemic let it come out.”