Windstream Enterprise Partner ProgramRising like a Phoenix to transform and empower the channel

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Making changes to capitalize on a transformative marketThe only constant in our business is change. To help support the success of our valued channel partners and the needs of our customers, we’ve made some changes at Windstream Enterprise. Raising the bar for ourselves, to capitalize on transformative changes in our space.

Whether you’re new to the Windstream Enterprise Channel Program, or you’re familiar with it and perhaps a bit skeptical from days past, we invite you to read on. Learn how our new program is designed to be different and to join us.

What’s changed?Heading into 2018, Windstream Enterprise has already made major changes from the ground up. Including two important acquisitions to bolster our offering in rapidly growing and lucrative markets—SD-WAN and UCaaS—along with new product introductions, and new marketing support that speaks to customer need. On top of that, we’ve changed the Partner Program in a number of important ways. We’ve even established a new business unit, Cloud & Connectivity, to combine the resources of our previously disparate Enterprise, Small Business and Wholesale markets, to step out front of the transformation we see taking place in the market around us.

Why Windstream Enterprise? Why now?The Windstream Enterprise Channel Program is different from what our partners may have experienced in 2015 and 2016. Simply stated, we’re taking the program to a much higher level to benefit our partners and customers alike.

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RENEWED COMMITMENT TO THE CHANNELWe’ve amplified our focus on the partner and customer experience from the CEO to the Channel Manager (and everyone in between) for businesses of all sizes, including SMB.

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE/EASE OF DOING BUSINESS/ACCOUNTABILITYOur renewed focus on the channel has led to significant progress in the operational support aspects of our business. We’re streamlining everything from quoting deals, to install intervals, to repair and escalations. We have aggressive targets in place to continue improvements and will be sharing our progress directly with our partner community on a regular basis.

PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION (RIGHT TO WIN)As mentioned above, Windstream Enterprise owns two of the hottest solutions in two hot and fast growing categories that are highly relevant to customer need. Our SD-WAN Concierge and OfficeSuite UCaaS offerings, combined with our nationwide capability and experience puts Windstream Enterprise and our channel partners in a class above all others.

BEST-IN-CLASS NETWORKOur $3 billion investment in our network over the past 3 years has generated unprecedented performance gains in reliability, efficiency, coverage, and scale. It’s an investment that pays off for everyone, and our partners have a front row seat at the table.

A glimpse of changes happening at Windstream Enterprise

Got your interest?So that’s just a taste of what we’re doing to change things up to benefit the channel. Here’s a slightly deeper dive to help bring our transformation into greater perspective.

Renewed commitment to the channelIn such a dynamic environment, IT leaders look to their own partners, organizations like you, to help them navigate change and manage their IT investments wisely. So we’ve remade our Channel Program to empower you to rise to meet customer need and expectations.

That includes a maniacal focus on reducing churn, and increasing sales and profitability. We’re aligning our customer base and our customer advocates by partner in order to streamline the engagement process and foster better partnerships. We’re aligning resources across the customer lifecycle to ensure customers receive the right level of care and support based on their size and complexity. Active efforts and campaigns have been introduced with our partners to ensure customers are using the most effective technologies matched to current and future business need. We’re proud of these efforts and advancements already in place, including:

Recently appointed Donna Wenk as Vice President, respectively of Customer Experience and Advocacy. Her extensive experience with the partner channel enables her to lead efforts that always keep our partners top of mind.

Proactive efforts to refresh and renew customers prior to contract expiration. Keeping customers current with new technologies has reduced churn by 50%, doubling the average length of a customer tenure; thereby locking in partner residual commissions longer.

Generated $3M of incremental base upsell revenue in 2017, yielding $500K in partner commissions.

Developing OfficeSuite and SD-WAN certification and training for customer advocates and our partners.

Empowering you to rise to meet customer needs

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Strong team focus on partner and customer experience

A commitment that starts at the topWorking with Windstream Enterprise, you’ll see our amplified focus on our partners and on customer experience with our entire team. Every layer of the organization is invested in the success of the channel, including Sales, Care and Repair, Ops, Marketing, and everyone else in between. Here’s what the Windstream Enterprise leadership team has to say about our commitment to the channel.

TONY THOMAS President & Chief Executive Officer“We’re 100% committed to the channel. We’re going to drive success to the channel

and want to be the carrier of choice for you.”

LAYNE LEVINE President Cloud & Connectivity“Partners are hearing and seeing our transformation story, they’re embracing the

change and are optimistic about Windstream Enterprise’s future. We’re highly engaged with the channel and recognize its vital role in our future success.”

CURT ALLEN Senior Vice President Channel Sales“The channel needs a healthy Windstream Enterprise, and we need a healthy

channel. Windstream Enterprise is serious about its commitment to the channel and has integrated it into the playbook of the corporate plan. I’m excited to be leading the Channel Program. The road ahead is prosperous for both the company and the channel.”

The Windstream Enterprise Channel Program is truly reborn. We’re excited about the collective opportunities IT transformation presents us, and about our trusted relationships, and we look forward to capitalizing on them with you; Our Partners, Our Colleagues, Our Friends.

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Operational excellence, ease of doing business and accountability

A philosophy of the workplace where problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership results in the ongoing improvement in an organization. The process involves focusing on the customers’ needs, keeping the employees positive and empowered, and continually improving the current activities in the workplace.

As an industry, communications providers are not routinely applauded for delivering a positive customer experience. Windstream Enterprise is out to change that, with a major focus on continuous operational excellence. Several initiatives have been put into place to drive significant improvement across key areas, all of which promise to reflect positively on our partners:

A single dedicated support channel means no more segmenting customers based on SMB or Enterprise, legacy or non-legacy, etc. Every one of your end users matters to us, and we want to make it easy to do business with Windstream Enterprise through a simplified structure regardless of who or where they are.

Enhanced partner experience with preferred contact triage line and dedicated service delivery project manager.

Significant investments to consolidate and simplify systems, tools and processes, with plans in place to do more.

Leveraging the best features of the Windstream Enterprise, EarthLink and Broadview Networks partner portals to create a single, best-in-class partner portal with agile development practices to quickly bring portal features to partners.

Bi-monthly scorecards will be in place by 1Q18 providing partners with a view of quarterly performance across key areas, and enhancing accountability to benefit everyone in the process.

Operational Excellence

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Commitment to continuous improvementOperational performance scorecard: AccountabilityWindstream Enterprise is focused on delivering key performance and accountability improvements and the numbers prove we’re delivering against our promises.

PERFORMANCE METRIC 3Q 2017 4Q 2017 1Q 2018

CDDD 65% 70% 80%

OfficeSuite (adding new locations) 25 Days 3-5 Days 3-5 Days

SD-WAN turn up* 40 Days 30 Days 20 Days

Service level 70% 75% 80%

*SD-WAN (no access) CDDD = Customer Desired Due Date

Serious about ease of doing businessWindstream Enterprise acknowledges a not so distant past of being difficult to do business with. Our move to reinvent our future resulted in changes in corporate strategy, strategic acquisitions and movement of support personnel. With a strong strategic direction in place, our business has positively shifted toward building a Channel Program that thrives on being easy to do business with. Positive improvements have already taken place, including;

Unified, national Channel Program. Quoting, ordering, partner lifecycle management, commissions, training and education are all under single leadership for all three of our prior legacy companies (Windstream, EarthLink and Broadview Networks).

250+ talented professionals dedicated to channel support structure; inclusive of 40 sales engineers and principle solutions architects, 40 quote and order support and 60 customer channel advocates.

Four channel focused, established “Right to Win” areas to focus the Channel Program and partners on key categories/opportunities where Windstream Enterprise holds unique competitive differentiation and advantage.

Overhauling and improving all aspects of the quote to contract experience, from one end to the other.

Reduced quoting intervals by 50%+ in the past 30 days; averaging 3-5 days for the majority of quotes. On track to achieve further interval reductions by 1Q18.

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Product differentiation: Windstream Enterprise’s right to win

Windstream Enterprise’s vision is to provide our customers and partners with best in breed technology solutions that address today’s critical business initiatives. These include solutions aligned with cloud adoption, CX/customer experience initiatives, and security.

We believe our sense of focus is critical. Partners have previously identified Windstream Enterprise as the “all things” provider” – having something for everyone. While it makes for a great broad stroke marketing line, it’s not a good business position. So we audited our strengths and weaknesses and determined we’d focus on four key areas where we believe Windstream Enterprise is uniquely positioned as the carrier of strength, we call them our Right to Win Scenarios.

Distributed retail, healthcare, banking and service enterprises investing in the customer experience

UCaaS and CCaaS across all business sizes

SD-WAN as a service, businesses in states of cloud adoption

On-net capacity to meet bandwidth demands

Windstream Enterprise maintains a robust solutions portfolio ideally aligned with our Right to Win strategy, designed to support the growing needs of distributed businesses as they evolve to achieve overall IT and digital business transformation.

SD-WAN Concierge and OfficeSuite from Windstream Enterprise are best in breed solutions and resonate in nearly every customer conversation, giving us the ability to truly rock the market.

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A simplified solutions strategy that resonates well with customer needs

While Windstream Enterprise offers a variety of solutions to enable customers to achieve their own business objectives, we’ve organized them in a dramatically simplified way that makes it easy to sell into customer locations across all industries and sizes. We’ve done this by organizing them by solutions designed to achieve three key strategic objectives that are also aligned with our previous Right to Win.

OPTIMIZE PERFORMANCESolutions to optimize application performance and reliability, support IT transformation and cloud adoption and keep pace with constantly growing demand for bandwidth.

SD-WAN

MPLS VPN

Wavelength Services

Cloud Connect

Diverse Connect

Ethernet (VLS, E-LAN)

ENGAGE CUSTOMERSSolutions to engage customers and end users, gaining insight into needs and behaviors, strengthening relationships and delivering a personalized customer experience to build loyalty.

OfficeSuite

UCaaS

CCaaS

Secure WiFi & Analytics

PROTECT YOUR BUSINESSSolutions to protect your business and customer data, your network, employees and IT assets from the threat of attack, intrusion or theft, and protecting the reputation and value of your organization and brand.

Managed Network Security

PCI Compliance

DDoS

Business Continuity

SOLUTIONS TO

Windstream Enterprise Professional Services support initial assessment, implementation and ongoing monitoring and management.

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Best-in-class network

To deliver against this ambitious challenge, Windstream Enterprise has invested steadily and heavily in modernizing our network to support our accelerated journey towards SDN. To begin the process, over the past three years, we’ve invested over $3B in our network and will continue to invest in our quest to create a best-in-class network in the years to come, including:

Continued network expansion

Improved product portfolio

Continued architectural rationalization

Reduced cycle times

FIXED WIRELESS POP

POP (POINT OF PRESENCE)

CLOUD CORE NODE

DATA SERVICES

IP NETWORK

TRANSPORT SERVICES

3035 | 1.18

SEATTLE

SALT LAKE CITY

SAN JOSE

PHOENIX

LAS VEGAS

DENVER

LOUISVILLE

INDIANAPOLIS

GRAND RAPIDS

CLEVELANDBUFFALO

ROCHESTER

ALBANY

BOSTON

NEW YORK CITYNEWARK

ASHBURNWASHINGTON D.C.

PITTSBURGH

PHILADELPHIA

MINNEAPOLIS

LOS ANGELES

RICHMOND

DETROIT

ALBUQUERQUE

OAKLAND

PORTLAND

ANAHEIM

ANDOVER

WESTBOROUGH

VIRGINIA BEACH

SYRACUSE

EPHRATA

BALTIMORE

ASHLANDASHLAND

COLUMBUS

AKRON

CINCINNATI

BETHLEHEM

MADISON

MILWAUKEE

CHICAGO

CEDAR RAPIDS

DES MOINES

OMAHA

LINCOLN

KANSAS CITYST. LOUIS

TULSA

OKLAHOMA CITY

DALLAS

SAN ANTONIO

AUSTIN

HOUSTON NEW ORLEANS

LITTLE ROCK

MEMPHISNASHVILLE

KNOXVILLE

BIRMINGHAM

ATLANTA

FITZGERALD

JACKSONVILLE

ORLANDO

TAMPA

FORT LAUDERDALE

MIAMI

COMMERCEGREENVILLE

CHARLOTTE

RALEIGH

GREENSBOROCONCORD

LEXINGTON*

Windstream Enterprise is steadily building out our nationwide network which now includes over 150,000 route miles of fiber.

The ability to provide network solutions optimized to deliver a superior customer experience for our customers—that includes improved performance, reliability and security, that offers/supports flexibility, scalability and IT agility, too—depends heavily on our own network infrastructure designed to do the same. And to keep on doing it well into the future, regardless of how the business environment evolves and changes.

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Providing the reliability today’s customers demand

To provide crucial resiliency and reliability, Windstream Enterprise is committed to continuously focusing on network improvement and reduction in outage impacts and the proof is in the results:

Network outage events are down approximately 1% year over year

25% year over year reduction in the number of customers impacted by outage events

28% year over year reduction in the number of customer outage minutes

YEAR ENTERPRISE AVAILABILITY

2014 99.971%2015 99.984%2016 99.984%2017* 99.988%

*YTD through August 2017 All network metrics measured across the core to the provider edge, both on and off-net.

A network designed to meet customer needs across every application need. To match the needs of our customers by solution type, our current network delivers on all fronts:

Transport (Ultra Long-Haul DWDM)

150,000 ULH, intercity, and metro fiber route miles (EarthLink 16,000 + Windstream Enterprise 131,000)

Software Defined Network Orchestrated Waves solution (SDNow) focusing on intent-based, on-demand automation of wavelength services in a multi-vendor, multi-platform, multi-domain environment

SD-WAN + OfficeSuite

SD-WAN with UCaaS solution positioned as a next-generation, future-proof product that adds significant value as differentiated product set

Access-agnostic product offerings enable the dramatic improvement in competitive positioning across Enterprise and SMB segments

Total of 86 SD-WAN gateways deployed across 9 network locations

IP network

Tier 1 nationwide IP network with best-in-class transit capability enabling next-generation layer 3 access methodologies and direct connectivity to cloud-based applications and services

Extensive provider edge density with increasing diversity options and failover capability

Voice network

Extensive Voice and VoIP network platform density allowing customers more entry points into the Voice/VoIP network enabling the migration from legacy TDM infrastructure to our consolidated and next-generation UCaaS/VoIP platforms

A reminder of changes happening at Windstream EnterpriseRenewed commitment to the channelWe’re more committed than ever as evidenced by the active participation in the channel by our senior executive team, starting with Tony Thomas our CEO, Layne Levine, President of Cloud & Connectivity and SVP/Channel Chief Curt Allen.

Operational excellence/ease of doing business/accountabilityWe get that we haven’t been easy to do business with. We’ve made massive investments with demonstrable improvement in solution development, quoting and service delivery intervals.

Product differentiation (right to win)As mentioned above, Windstream Enterprise owns two of the hottest solutions in what is arguably the two most relevant service categories today. Our SD-WAN Concierge and OfficeSuite UCaaS offerings, combined with our nationwide capability are second to none.

Best-in-class networkOur $3 billion investment in our network over the past 3 years has generated unprecedented performance gains in reliability, efficiency, coverage, and scale. It’s an investment that pays off for everyone, and our partners have a front row seat at the table.

2958 | 01.18 ©2018 Windstream Services, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

To learn more about the Windstream Enterprise Partner Program, visit windstreamenterprise.com

About Windstream Enterprise

Windstream Enterprise collaborates with businesses across the U.S. to drive digital transformation by delivering solutions that solve today’s most complex networking and communication challenges.