ACADEMIA

Cbeyond announced a formal agreement with FiberLight, a national provider of high performance fiber optic networking services. This partnership will enable Cbeyond to leverage FiberLight's backbone to extend the Company's dark fiber reach to new buildings and small and medium sized businesses across the U.S.

Cbeyond's strategy is focused on combining its cloud infrastructure, network and consultative sales approach to bring the benefits of secure cloud computing to the most technically demanding small businesses nationwide. The partnership with FiberLight brings Cbeyond closer to reaching its complementary goals of lighting 1,000 buildings by the end of 2013 and transitioning an additional 29 percent of its access customers to Metro Ethernet in the same time frame. Cbeyond currently provides 21 percent of its customers with Metro Ethernet via Ethernet-over-Copper technology.

"Our strategy is driven by the needs of our customers to grow with us through innovative technology solutions," said Brent Cobb, chief customer officer for Cbeyond. "Our partnership with FiberLight will help us deliver on this strategy by bringing fast bandwidth speeds to small and medium sized businesses across the U.S. over our secure, private network, which is the foundation for any successful cloud implementation. As more and more customers consider moving their data to the cloud, it is critical to provide an end-to-end secure network."

"Our association with a high quality growth company like Cbeyond, recently named one of Forbes most trustworthy companies of 2012, further illustrates the value of FiberLight's flexible service offering," said Ben Edmond, president of sales and marketing for FiberLight. "Our ability to meet the needs of Cbeyond for dark fiber provides not only a potential cost savings opportunity associated with owner economics, but also supports their strategy for delivering Cbeyond 2.0 services, enabling more bandwidth and the key applications consuming that bandwidth, within the small to medium sized business market."

Cobb added, "Our unique combination of network assets, coupled with our award-winning cloud portfolio, provides small and medium sized businesses with a value proposition unmet in the marketplace. We are confident FiberLight's proven expertise and existing network footprint will help Cbeyond fulfill our mission which hasn't changed since our inception - to provide big business tools to our customers at prices they can afford and we can deliver profitably."