Amid a rebranding effort occurring on the residential side of the house, Charter Communications on Monday announced that Charter Business has been recast as Spectrum Business, a unit that offers a range of broadband, voice and video services to commercial customers.
Last month during the MSO’s fourth quarter earnings call, Charter president and CEO Tom Rutledge noted that the company was in the process of separating its business services operations into two groups – one focused on small- and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), and another that targets larger enterprise customers. That operational resembles shares similarities with that of Cablevision Systems, which relies on its Lightpath unit to server enterprise customers via its fiber-based Ethernet platform, and Optimum Business to serve SMBs over the MSO’s HFC network.
A Charter official confirmed that the SMB-focused portion of Spectrum Business unit will report into cable operations that’s led by Charter COO John Bickham, while Don Detampel, Charter’s EVP and president of commercial services, leads up the side concentrating on larger businesses and carrier customers that require fiber and more complex services.
Charter announced that new operational model internally last November, according to a memo obtained by Multichannel News.
“Charter Business has experienced strong growth over the past four years, yet the commercial revenue opportunity remains largely under penetrated across all customer segments,” the memo explained, noting that the commercial operations will be separated into two units – Spectrum Business and Spectrum Enterprise. “Today we are announcing a new commercial operating model that we believe will help accelerate our commercial growth and more aggressively drive market penetration. This new organizational structure will help define the organizational structure in the ‘New Charter’ post transaction."
Charter pulled in $262 million in business services revenues in the fourth quarter of 2014, a 16.1% increase versus the year-earlier quarter.
