SpaceX is turning to the channel to accelerate Starlink’s enterprise push, betting partners can open doors to lucrative government, mobility and edge connectivity opportunities.
SpaceX is looking to expand its indirect channel partnerships for its Starlink satellite-based broadband service.
Starbase, Texas-based SpaceX, the builder of reusable spacecraft and rockets that is currently planning to launch its IPO on June 12 and looking to raise $75 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, wrote in its May 20 S-1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it sees the channel as a way to increase enterprise customer adoption of its Starlink service.
SpaceX has assembled dedicated sales and engineering teams to market and support Starlink connectivity capabilities for aviation, maritime and land mobility, the company wrote in its S-1.
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“We expect to enable more customized deployments for land mobility across existing use cases such as commercial trucking fleets, and new applications enabled by more connected devices,” the company wrote. “We also continue to develop specialized networks for secure government applications via Starshield. By leveraging proven performance in mission-critical environments and expanding through channel partners in select geographies, we expect to drive increased adoption among high-value enterprise and government accounts.”
SpaceX did not respond to a CRN request for further information.
The company currently has a small number of authorized resellers in North America, including IT solution providers such as CDW, Dimension Data and Insight Enterprises, as well as telecom services providers and international solution providers with U.S. operations including Marlink, Paris, France, and Oslo, Norway-based MSP.
In March, SpaceX hired Jackie Smith as head of strategic partnerships. She previously worked at Cisco and Spunk for about 15 years, leaving as global vice president of Splunk partner sales, according to her LinkedIn account. Cisco bought Splunk in 2024.
Starlink currently has 10,500 active satellites orbiting the Earth out of about 12,000 that have been launched since 2019, according to the satellitemap.space satellite tracker. The company plans to launch a total of 42,000 satellites.
World Wide Technology is early in a partnership with Starlink, a company that it has been wanting to work with for quite a while, said Neil Anderson, vice president and CTO of the cloud infrastructure and AI solutions team at the St. Louis-based solution provider.
“We do see the demand from our commercial clients who are asking if Starlink can be used as a really robust and portable WAN solution, as an alternative to fixed broadband and so on,” Anderson told CRN.
“So we’ve been wanting to partner with them for a while,” he said. “It took us a while to get a partnership agreement in place because it was just kind of new for them. They were more used to dealing with residential. It’s been a fantastic relationship with them. They very much wanted to partner and expand to the commercial market, so it was just a matter of us reaching terms, looking at how we both can make money on this, and making sure that we’re not going into areas that we don’t want to. We don’t want to necessarily be a telecom provider, but we’re happy to resell other equipment.”
Starlink appears to be serious about building channel relationships, Anderson said.
“They were very flexible on the contracts,” he said. “Obviously it was a little new, which I expected. We expect that with anybody who’s new to a partnership in channel spaces, but they were very good about turning around language and contracts and being very flexible on things. It took a little bit, but I think that was just because it was new for them. But we found them really easy to work with.”
Chris Bogan, vice president of alliances at Mark III Systems, a Houston-based solution provider in the enterprise and government spaces, told CRN he hadn’t heard of such an initiative from SpaceX and Starlink, but that word of such a plan has been circulating in certain forums and social media sites.
Bogan said Mark III Systems has never partnered with Starlink but does have a number of Starlink users in its customer base as well as among his close friends and business acquaintances.
From that experience, “it’s definitely a very compelling story,” he said. “The whole idea now is how do you connect some of these edge environments with air quotes around edge because some of them are still large stores, large installations, things like that, that just may not be on main lines. So the idea of being able to use Starlink for something like that would be really compelling for those customers.”
Enterprises are good targets for Starlink for several reasons, Bogan said.
“We’ve got an enterprise background,” he said. “We understand how that works. We understand their security requirements. We understand connectivity. We understand the intricacies of very specific, highly custom networks. So being able to add something like Starlink would be attractive to us. We need to see some more details from Starlink, but it’s definitely got our attention.”
Bogan said he was at a recent distribution conference, and one of the speakers from a major space player said in a keynote that there’s going to be a large amount of growth in space and space-related technologies.
“The speaker said they don’t really have the people, the knowledge or know-how, and pretty much everything that’s done terrestrially here on earth is going to need to be done in space in some way, shape, or form,” he said. “His big keynote was all about, ‘Hey, these things you’re doing here as earth-based businesses are going to be very, very much required and very high-valued in space-based businesses.”
The kinds of investments that will go into space-based businesses from enterprises and governments spells opportunity, Bogan said.
“That wasn’t something a few years ago I would have necessarily thought of, but it certainly makes sense,” he said.
Wade Millward contributed to this story.
