With Major Marketing and Support Enhancements to SmartBiz, Calix Enables Broadband Providers To Accelerate Growth for 40 Million Small Businesses

SAN JOSE, CA & LONDON—February 15, 2024—Today, Calix, Inc. (NYSE: CALX) released significant updates to Calix SmartBiz™ that further accelerate growth for its customers and the small businesses they serve. These updates deliver multiple benefits for broadband service providers (BSPs), including the ability to onboard small business subscribers faster, expanded support capabilities, and deeper cloud insights to accelerate market penetration.

SmartBiz is a purpose-built small business solution that opens new revenue opportunities for BSPs to serve small businesses (approximately 40 million) across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The all-in-one solution enables BSPs to offer everything small businesses need to cater to their customers while ensuring seamless productivity for employees—including managed Wi-Fi, network security, and a variety of integrated capabilities that promote operational efficiency. New guest Wi-Fi insights also help small business owners increase the effectiveness of revenue-generating marketing campaigns.

Fully integrated for the Calix Broadband Platform, SmartBiz is easy to deploy and simple to manage because it builds on the same platform, workflow, and systems that Calix customers already use to delight their residential subscribers.

Additional updates released today for SmartBiz enable BSPs to:

• Deliver enhanced experiences for small business owners, their employees, and patrons. Calix released support for a secondary wired backup connection to ensure business continuity for critical equipment and transactions. Plus, the ability to retain existing primary SSID during onboarding helps BSPs reduce initial setup time and effort with minimal business disruption.
  
  
• Unlock the small business broadband market with deeper go-to-market insights. Updates to Calix Engagement Cloud help BSPs better identify and engage high-potential SmartBiz prospects. New insights provide an easy-to-use view of a BSP’s share of business subscribers, allowing them to clearly understand and target the market. New data lenses showcase SmartBiz growth trends and enable broadband marketers to boost campaign effectiveness with more targeted and relevant business subscriber engagement.
  
  
• Easily manage their small business accounts with extended support insights and capabilities. Calix Service Cloud released more support capabilities for SmartBiz so BSPs can improve efficiency for small business owners with extended service management and support tools. Now BSP customer service representatives can remotely set up staff time limits for access and secondary Ethernet WAN connection for resilience, allowing them to help small business owners make modifications or troubleshoot their service experience remotely.  

Smart Start for Managed Services—part of the award-winning Calix Customer Success Services team—empowers BSPs to plan, launch, support, and grow SmartBiz quickly and confidently. A growing number of Calix customers are successfully leveraging SmartBiz and the Smart Start program. DirectLink expects to more than double their SmartBiz subscribers in Oregon by the end of March. Smithville launched SmartBiz in their Indiana communities in only two months. Connexin, the first provider to launch SmartBiz in the UK, is increasing their market share in Hull by addressing a gap for solutions tailored to small business needs.

“When it comes to broadband, small businesses are often tied down to long-term, expensive enterprise packages or cheaper alternatives with little-to-no flexibility," said Alex Yeung, Connexin cofounder. "SmartBiz addresses a gap in the broadband market as businesses often have to compromise on speed over additional security or continuous connectivity that is critical for simple day-to-day tasks such as taking payments. We are proud to help enhance services for small businesses that are the lifeblood of Hull and the wider business community.”

“Our BSP customers continue to grow their SmartBiz wins at incredible rates,” said Michael Weening, president and chief executive officer at Calix. “With the flexibility of SmartBiz running on every Calix GigaSpire® BLAST system—indoor, outdoor, small, medium, and large systems—nearly every business scenario is covered with zero additional operational complexity. New updates enable BSPs to more easily and personally market to small business owners, communicating a fully integrated solution that is simple and fast to deploy. SmartBiz makes it easy to deliver everything a small business needs to be successful by providing a great experience for employees and patrons. With SmartBiz, BSPs can give small business owners more reliability, security, customization, and new business capabilities to drive their growth and deliver value for their community.”

Watch the webinar replay, “Setting Big Targets for Small Business Growth in 2024? Hear How DirectLink Built a Winning Strategy,” to learn more.

About Calix
This press release contains forward-looking statements that are based upon management’s current expectations and are inherently uncertain. Forward-looking statements are based upon information available to us as of the date of this release, and we assume no obligation to revise or update any such forward-looking statement to reflect any event or circumstance after the date of this release, except as required by law. Actual results and the timing of events could differ materially from current expectations based on risks and uncertainties affecting Calix’s business. The reader is cautioned not to rely on the forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Additional information on potential factors that could affect Calix’s results and other risks and uncertainties are detailed in its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and Annual Report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC and available at www.sec.gov.

Calix and the Calix logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Calix and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Calix’s trademarks can be found at https://www.calix.com/pages/trademarks.html. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.