Employee Spotlight: Ryan Pellegrino, Channel Director – East

“With these massive market opportunities for connectivity, there’s never been a better time to partner with Arelion.”

We see tremendous opportunities in the Channel for supporting the Trusted Advisors selling multinational and data center connectivity. Ryan Pellegrino, Channel Director – East, joined us in June to help us seize these opportunities. We spoke with Ryan to learn more about his vision for expanding our Conflict-Free Channel program and go-to-market strategy amid evolutions in the telecommunications ecosystem.

Q: Can you tell us about your background?

Before Arelion, I spent over ten years at GTT working in the Channel supporting Technology Services Distributors (TSDs) and Trusted Advisors nationally. In my last two years there, I sold carrier services in the Wholesale Channel, including IP Transit, Ethernet Transport and large blocks of IPv4. Through years of experience in the Channel, I’ve known about Arelion for a long time. So, I jumped at the opportunity to join an Internet carrier with a long legacy as the operator of the world’s #1-ranked Internet backbone.

Q: What are the Channel team’s goals?

We strive to increase our presence in the Channel by educating the ecosystem that consults and sells on connectivity solutions towards multinational opportunities about who we are and what we can do. We’re the #1 global Internet service provider. Yet, many Trusted Advisors don’t fully understand our capabilities, so education is critical. Amid the explosive growth of AI, everything is being pushed toward the data center, so customers need large pipes of bandwidth, and the backbone connectivity piece becomes even more crucial. This is exactly where Arelion excels.

We’re striving to help the Channel to grow upmarket with the amount of bandwidth that today’s marketplace demands. Our position is strong amid these evolutions, as we can provide IP transit into data centers, high-capacity optical transport between data centers, low-latency Cloud Connect to the top 5 cloud providers globally and more. In addition to our technological expertise, our Net Promoter Score of 70 is unparalleled, with world-class customer service being our key differentiator.

How will you achieve those goals?

Event attendance is crucial, so I’m going to be at every major TSD event throughout the rest of 2025. These include the TELARUS Partner Summit and App Direct in August, the AVANT Special Forces Summit in September, the Bridgepointe Tech Summit and Sandler Partners National in October and Intelisys Channel Connect in November. We need to get in front of leading TSDs and speak to Channel Managers before attending these events. We also need to research which subagents sell data center and multinational connectivity, then teach them about our capabilities as the operator of the Internet’s #1 ranked backbone network.

Q: Anything else?

I want to emphasize that Arelion is truly Channel-friendly and Channel-neutral. We won’t block a Trusted Advisor from selling to wholesale prospects because we understand their role as consultants extends into the data centers and their backbone connectivity needs. So instead of the traditional Channel model, where the Channel only sells to an Enterprise prospect, we encourage our Trusted Advisors to bring Arelion into both Enterprise and Wholesale opportunities alike.

We’ve had great success in conducting account mapping exercises with Trusted Advisors, where we share the prospective accounts that Arelion is targeting that also align with their existing relationships. This is an area where we see the biggest momentum and largest win rates, collectively.

With these massive market opportunities for connectivity, there’s never been a better time to partner with Arelion. After all, if you’re not talking to us about your customer’s backbone connectivity needs, someone else is.