A brand from the past is back with us today out west. Integra has moved to reorganize its business units to tailor its approach to different customer types. And in doing so it is bringing back a familiar face: Electric Lightwave.
After retooling itself over the past few years to take better advantage of its fiber assets, Integra is fine-tuning its approach to its markets. Integra Business will aim at the mid-market and general enterprise opportunities, while Electric Lightwave will aim at the wholesale, data center, content, government, and the largest enterprise opportunities. Each represents about 40% of the company’s revenue, while a third business unit will serve the remaining SME businesses that Integra used to focus on.
Electric Lightwave was the company Integra purchased from Citizens way back in 2006, and despite falling into formal disuse the brand name has endured. The old ELI was a carrier’s carrier, and while the new business unit will have a somewhat wider focus, so do all ‘wholesale’ models these days. The new ELI unit will have all the fiber operations under its umbrella, including the company’s growing portfolio of 3,000 on-net buildings. Integra plans to start expanding the footprint more aggressively, not just adding near-net buildings but building out new metro loops and such to expand the overall network reach.
Of course, a suspicious mind might also see this move as the first step toward splitting up the assets for a sale. After all, Integra has been talked of as a consolidation target many times over the past five years and continues to seem like a good fit for someone like Windstream with a need for a fiber footprint in the west. But in 2014 it was Integra doing the buying, albeit on a small scale with the ProTel and WCI deals.
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Categories: Fiber Networks · Metro fiber
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Integra is a ship without a captain. Despite hugely valuable assets, ego and arrogance are the company’s core competencies. Inept, immature management and a complete lack of cohesive focus across the organization have conspired to turn a once promising company into a heap of demoralized and demotivated people who have no idea what they are doing or why.
The best thing that could happen to Integra is to spin off the SME market to someone else and then be sold to a company who will clean house. There is a ton of dead weight on that sinking ship and whoever the eventual new masters are should take a very long look at firing anyone with a manager title or above.
They have all the perfect ingredients for telecom failure: cronyism that pervades across the enterprise, arrogant defiance of best practice in favor of egomaniacal managers ruling by idiocy, and foolhardy “savings” efforts that would spend $100 to save a single buck. Time to send the children packing and bring the adults back to turn the tide.
Wow ‘more layoffs’ person, so could you have started this diatribe with “I was layed off from Integra so…” Not saying you are wrong, was just a bit over-the-top from an armchair observer. Perhaps you could have finished with the point that they should have just put you in charge to solve all ills.
Actually as a current Integra employee I would imagine I have as accurate and realistic a viewpoint as any commenters here, perhaps more so. And my views are not colored by my personal political ambitions.
The purpose of a company is to make money, not make inept management feel better about their abject failures. If anyone can show how Integra has not been a dismal failure since the Eschelon acquisition please enlighten me.
As a current Integra customer with a sizeable account, you summarized it well. Management is a complete joke. They’re running the company into the ground. Complete lack of logic, while competitors are realistic and gaining customers. Sad what this organization has become.
“Wholesale” providers are more likely to give you useful network maps.
BTW: Rob, Integra has PDF and KMZ network maps now.