Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining today's Channel Vision webinar, sponsored by Comcast Business. This is Channel Vision editor, Gerald Baldino, and I will be your moderator for today's event. Today, we'll be talking about SD-WAN from racks to apps and how to solve your customers'networking challenges while growing your recurring revenue. Joining us today is Bill Steen, who is Director of Indirect Channel and Alliance Marketing at Comcast Business.
and Josh Hendrickson, who is Senior Manager of SDN and SD-WAN product sales. If you have any questions during the webinar, please submit them through the Q&A portal located at the bottom of the Zoom platform. A Q&A session will take place at the end of the webinar. At this point, I'd like to turn the webinar over to the Comcast team to begin. Terrific.
Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Hi, everybody. This is Bill Steen.
I work in our corporate marketing function and focus on our partners and our indirect channel. Super excited about drilling down a little bit on what we're doing with SD-WAN. Our product's been out in the market for about two years and we've definitely gotten a lot of good winds under our belt and a lot of good experience that we can share with you.
So Josh will be kicking it off for us and then I'll follow up at the end. But from an agenda standpoint, Josh will talk a little bit about what we see going on with the customers across larger SMB into mid-market, even just smaller enterprise. That's kind of driving their need for improving kind of their networking capabilities and migrating from MPLS to a degree.
We'll then go into how we're deploying SDN technology and how we see that enabling our SD-WAN platform because it really lays the foundation for the partner community to generate a lot of revenue and solve their customer problems with. additional network functions. We'll also talk a little bit about targeting, case studies, where to win, what our sweet spot is. So we know there's a lot of different options out there and we think we have a very unique value prop and Josh will talk a little bit about you know where we're weird and how we can kind of be where we fit in terms of your customer base. I'll jump back in talk about how we support you.
what the resources are, how we enable your marketing, how we enable your training, and then specific next steps to get going. So that's what we'd love to cover. And with that, Josh, I'll go ahead and introduce you and pass the baton. Thank you so much, Bill. Pleasure to be with you all this morning.
So let's talk a little bit about kind of the environment that a lot of our customers are transitioning into, right? In a classic space, people used to have a... Pretty solidified network that they were either connected to or not connected to.
But now we're starting to see a couple of pressures that are impacting the way that our customers do business in a way in which we need to support if we want to continue to be relevant to them. So the first is everything is moving to the cloud, right? Business apps, entire IT workloads, entire ways in which people are doing business and business support is becoming so much more cloud dependent.
Historically, we used to see servers co-located on premises, you know, the old micro database model where you'd have, you know, the one group of people that worked to keep your exchange server or local applications up. That's moving away and in a lot of ways has moved away. And now we're starting to see infrastructure, software platforms being delivered as a service through these cloud technologies.
And as things grow. And we start to see more artificial intelligence in the cloud as we start to see more specific permutations of customer programs, as we start to see kind of the encroaching of the edge infrastructure for cloud. We're going to see that policy, that philosophy, that way of supporting our customers continue to go in that direction.
So that's the thing that we need to bear in mind as we build products and support our customers. The second piece is customers and employees now rely on their services being available and with them. them and accessible as they move throughout their day and move throughout their environments. So it used to be, you know, I'm on the company network. I can utilize the company resources.
This is where my CAD file is. Now there's an expectation that I have the ability to access my company resources. I can do so securely and I can do so using multiple platforms, an iPad.
I can use my phone. I can use my laptop in the field. I might even be guest utilizing a workstation in a customer location.
So we're starting to see a high degree of elasticity that is required by our customers. And that mobility focus is a big part of what drives our agenda on the product side. We're starting to see the integration of social media, streaming video and music, and the Internet of Things. It used to be that a lot of these elements were nuisance elements.
Social media was something designed for people to behave recreationally. But now there is so much more business function associated with it. We cannot apply a cudgel that says we need to take down Facebook for everyone.
Now we have organizations that have social media strategies that need to be supported for some very discrete groups, where other groups, you know, it's seen as more of a distraction, you know. Similar philosophy for the Internet of Things. It doesn't matter tremendously if your farm sensors associated with detecting water in the soil are up, you know, 99.99% of the time. But it certainly is meaningful that they have the ability to cache and access the Internet at some point in time to download their data.
So we're starting to see different business functions and different service functions have very, very, very specific needs that require specific tailoring to support. And then the last market pressure that really is pushing us around is branch offices need to deliver the experience that's similar to headquarters experiences. Used to be the case that HQ is the entity that had the big pipes and the branch offices kind of had to deal with what they had. We transition customers all the time.
from MPLS structures where their branch offices had, you know, five megs, 10 megs of internet over to something that is much more conducive to creating the productivity experience that people are used to at headquarters. All right. So as our customers are responding to these environments and we're responding to support them, we see a future that is a lot more software defined. And I'm particularly excited about the SDN portion of things.
Software-defined networking is a platform really that allows software to talk to the network applications and then talk to the hardware to make what needs to be done attainable. That's it. Like at a very high level, separating that network control and forwarding functions and optimizing your systems by using software to make that work is kind of the heart of the revolution. And it's... One of those things that, you know, fundamentally, it's very, very simple and easy to understand, but as we apply creative thought towards what we can do with that kind of system, you start to see the potential grow.
I had a panelist at a previous event remark that, you know, a lot of these technology changes seem really simple, but their impact is very broad, that the steam engine was originally designed to pull water out of coal mines, you know, and it eventually kicked off the industrial revolution in a lot of respects. Right. So one of the first things we're going to see on the software defined networking platform and something that is certainly exciting to a lot of our customers is how it can affect the wide area network. Right.
So software defined wide area networking, something that we see all over the place. And what that is, is we're taking that philosophy of having software have the ability to speak to applications and talk to hardware on behalf of what those applications need. We're having it do that function, but specifically for our customers wide area networks. Again, fundamentally very, very simple, but the impact of that is very broad reaching.
When you do something like that, you have the ability to virtualize routers, firewalls. You have the ability to leverage WAN optimization. You can get really creative with what you plug into the system and set it up so that application is distinctly tailored.
So we see this internally as kind of an industry move from racks to apps. In the past, you used to have, you know, your router, your Wi-Fi module, your wireless, you know, bridge. You'd have your firewall, you know, and your communication systems, your phones, all representing different hardware components.
And if you were a large organization, they usually represented very different teams that may have conflicting priorities. Your security team would decide and purchase the. firewall.
That firewall may or may not have the routing functions required for the network team to achieve what they need. And so you end up pancaking a lot of systems so that you can make sure that you achieve exactly what is required for your services. But in an environment like this one, where we have the ability to let the software run the hardware and then the software to talk to the applications, all of these rack-mounted systems become software-based.
So for example, that SD-WAN appliance that we've led with, we can install that as a virtual network function on that Comcast Business UCPE, you see about midway down the screen. And the footprint, if you decide to buy an SD-WAN appliance versus if you buy an SD router appliance, a managed router service on the same ActiveCore platform, is much, much, much lower, right? It's very easy for our customers to kind of use that as a way to tune and work with.
right-sizing the software for their environments. And then as we continue to see software impact what we can do with the hardware on our systems, we're starting to roadmap development for other services like Wi-Fi and unified communication support. Now today out of the box we can support SIP prioritization, packet duplication, stuff like that, but we're starting to explore some really exciting possibilities with creating even more diverse ecosystems that are all contained within that single box.
And then all of this has the ability to work over our gigabit enabled network. So as we're excited to see software push away what used to be hardware elements in our devices, we're also excited to see networks become really what they have the potential to be, which is gigabit over coax and then much, much, much higher as we start to look at fiber networks. So we're really unlocking both the software and the network aspect.
in terms of what we can do with our services. Go ahead and hit the next slide. Perfect.
So here are some of our service characteristics. And this part is important because to Bill's earlier point, in the agent space especially, there's a diversity of options for you to purchase services from. And so what's most useful to you is a provider who maybe doesn't try to say that they're a jack of all trades, but a provider that tries to mask. or a particular slice of the market or particular market approach and who's weird in a specific way.
So I'm going to go I'm going to focus very, very specifically on how we are weird, because I think that is going to be the opportunity for most of our partners. So first and foremost, and I feel like I communicate this a lot and probably still not enough. This is an over the top feature and it is available nationwide.
Comcast will truck roll. for anyone within the United States for SD-WAN. So if you've got that customer with 80 sites and they're really concerned about having support on one of those locations that's a bit remote, they've only got an office admin there and a couple of staff members, this is something that is very, very easy to kind of create that support model.
Look, Comcast is going to have a tech go out there. If you sell something in Hawaii, that tech will be me. And that person is going to install and make sure that it's a guarded customer experience based upon what we've defined in our scope.
This is designed for hybrid and multi-WAN solutions. My history is in a lot of the wide area networking space and a lot of the layer one space as well. And I know that there's a lot of promise out there with SD-WAN where you take one best effort service and another best effort service, blend them together and get something that really is enterprise class.
And in a lot of cases, that's true. But what I find is that especially as we go up markets and we work with our mid-market and enterprise customers, they take a trust but verify perspective. You know, they're happy to use SD-WAN to get maybe that gig coax internet to those branch offices.
That's a no-brainer. But they're going to keep a little bit of their MPLS if they have it today or keep a little bit of their private networking. Our system can do that.
Designed for hybrid, designed for multi-WAN environments. So let's talk about security and layer three devices. Each device comes with a router, a predefined and included in the system.
And it also comes with a firewall, a layer three and layer four stateful firewall. So a lot of people will purchase a platform like this one versus something that we see a lot of our competitors offer solely because they need to have that security function and that routing function. And maybe at some of these branch offices, routing and security is important.
but not important enough for them to dispatch someone specifically to do the installation or to have a branded firewall, right? We have the ability to configure static and dynamic IP routing and that is really fun when you see that you can do it on the fly. So, you know, if a customer has a need to work to change their routes so that an end location can utilize something that's optimized in terms of cloud infrastructure or something to that effect. You can program that from the application in a distant location.
It kind of centralizes your management so it's easy to use, but still gives you the ability to get really specific in terms of the IP routing piece. I'm going to talk about these next two things together. We have a flat rate pricing with no ETFs. So when we talk about customers that this is a really good fit for, the flat rate pricing makes it very easy for people with larger circuits to feel very comfortable with the system. One of my favorite things to do when supporting salespeople in the field or agents in the field is to take a look at a competitor's proposal and tune it up to what the price would be 18 months from now when the customer's bandwidth doubles.
Right. Nelson's law bandwidth doubles every 18 months. So, you know, if you if you turn that back over and you say, sure, we're at price parity today, but in 18 months, you know, it's not going to be twice as much.
But you're looking at 30 to 50 percent more cost with these usage based systems, you know, whereas with us, it's flat. The world could explode. People could require 10 gig connections, right, to get connections at each of these locations.
That could be the new norm in a year. And our system would be resilient to that. Right.
So. We tend to have a lot of customers that really start considering us in that space. And I would say at about 50 megs to 200 megs, that's the tipping point.
Below 50, you know, again, I want to be weird. I want to be very good at a specific slice to support you guys. I think below 50, there's some other options that you might find that are more economical. But 50 to 200 and above, you know, you start to hit those points where it makes a lot of business sense to go with something flat as opposed to something variable.
And then we also have no ETFs. So a lot of the market, if you guys are selling SD-WAN, the general experience I've seen is that you're selling smaller service profiles, 10 megs, 20 megs. Flat rate pricing can help capture the mid market and above there.
Or you're running into a lot of customers that are really scared of SD-WAN. And rightfully so. Anytime there's a new technology, nobody wants to be the first mouse to the cheese. Right.
The first person who's going to be punished by being an early adopter. You know, so what we do is we have no early termination fees. I have one customer who's been a temporary customer for 18 months.
She came from private networking. She's very, very, very comfortable with what private networking can do for prioritization. She inherited an environment, got a new job. And I said, you know, look, let's try this. The stuff that you need it to do, I know it can do.
But if you don't like it, if at any point in time, it's the wrong fit. You can move to a different SD-WAN provider. You can move back to MPLS, which Comcast does not offer.
You can move to ENS, which Comcast does offer. That ETF, that no ETF piece made her comfortable trying something that was a little bit new that she didn't have a ton of experience with. And, you know, again, 18, 19 months later, she's still using it.
It's still solving her needs. So we are a lot of entities first real enterprise class SD-WAN service because we make our customers feel safe. I'm going to circle back to the wireless backup. We offer wireless backup with this service as well.
Great in a failover scenario. Also, no early termination liability, no early termination fees. So very, very easy. And, you know, if we get a chance to have a one on one, I'll show you the sales flow. But very easy for our customers to work with us initially with a wireless backup and their existing infrastructure.
We can understand a little bit more about their environment and then transition them to something that. Is evidence-based changed? It's a real slow, real good sale.
All right. We got real-time service configuration. And then we also have a digital experience that provides stability and control across the entire network from any device.
Apple, Android, computer. We even have an Alexa integration. I don't know a ton of people that are doing provisioning from their Alexa.
But I love that the language is so defined for our system that we can onboard Alexa. and be able to have it hook into all of these different elements. So, and I want to emphasize, you know, let's take a look at this digital experience.
It's one thing to be able to do lots of stuff with SD-WAN, right? There are some platforms out there, including the one where ours is based on, that, I mean, that thing will mow your lawn if you want it to. Like you can give it so specific in terms of how you configure that device.
But you also, to create a good experience, have to have a language. that your users can understand and grasp onto. I love iOS.
I love Cisco systems, you know, the classic stuff, not the newer stuff that's a little bit more gooey intensive. But the challenge is that I can't explain that to someone, especially if they're not from a networking background, without giving them, you know, a high degree of education. So we at Comcast have taken an approach of making it very easy for our customers to understand our systems.
You know, being there if our customers need to ask, if they're confused about something or need some help. But ideally, having them be able to handle most of the service configurations on their own. And when it works well, it's amazing because I got to say, I mean, as much as I feel the Comcast service has improved from a call-in perspective, and it certainly has, the best experience you can have is when you can fix it on your own. And you don't have to worry about calling into anybody.
You feel like you have full command. over the network functions that you need to affect. So if you haven't had a chance to take a look at it, definitely check out the portal because it is a lot of fun.
And a really clear way to educate people on how to use the network. All right. Let's talk about our wins and where to target. So I've got I'm going to assume two different audiences here. If you've sold SD-WAN before, what you're going to notice is not on the slide are very large, very thin customers.
So like an AMPM getting failover at 10 megs for, you know. 4,000 locations. You're not going to see this listed here, right?
Because if your customer has a very simple need, if they are mostly cost pressured, if that's the reason why they're making an SD-WAN decision is cost and failover, and they don't necessarily need to have bandwidth that can be unlocked, they're not excited about virtualizing a lot of their hardware at the edge, then you're going to see that that's maybe a better fit for some other providers. But if you see that you have a customer... who's a little bit more of the enterprise side, a little bit more of the mid-market side, you know, the school district side, which is certainly exciting to me too, or the fitness club side, where they need to offer some discrete and specific services at each of their locations, and they can virtualize some of their appliances, then you start to see the economics really make sense, the system really makes sense. Healthcare is something that is exceptionally strong for us, healthcare, finance, and then kind of the retail manufacturing space.
So healthcare entities really need to focus on HIPAA compliance. They need to focus on security. They need to focus, I mean, they're one of the few customers that we support where literal lives are on the line if infrastructure goes down in key places.
So, you know, being able to have there be unlimited bandwidth up to four underlays, really tunable systems that do, you know, end-to-end connections and don't necessarily have to pass through a cloud gateway. You know, these are all things that are extremely powerful for healthcare providers, right? And then to the people who are operating with limited SD-WAN customers or no SD-WAN customers, the people that are a little bit scared, you know, I'd take a look at that upscale dining chain, take a look at, you know, that fitness club.
So when you connect with a customer and you understand what they're trying to achieve, you understand the specific applications that are running on their network and you show how you can tune those and make them stronger, more resilient, right? And give them velocity so they can start to affect the customer's business. That's where we really start to shine. That and you combine that with the no early termination fee piece, and you become a pretty easy experiment for a technology or a technology driven company to focus on, you know. And I like the Philadelphia Credit Union CIO's testimony.
We now have more time to focus on... strategic priorities, cybersecurity, driving long-term value in the core business, that's when we know that we've built a successful partnership with our customers is when they become better at what they do because we have offloaded stuff that used to be very, very hard for them to manage, configure, or define on their networks. Go ahead and hit the next slide. Excellent.
So let's talk about, and this is a Gardner slide. So this is a student of the industry perspective slide. And I like this because, you know, it shows kind of where the world is going. I do want to be fully specific.
Some of these are nearer to Comcast and some of them are a little bit further away. I'll be specific on which ones. But this is definitely the future we should be thinking about. The first is bandwidth on demand.
Now, full transparency, on the Comcast side, it is a lot easier to engineer a network for peak usage than it is to engineer a network that could reach peak usage. depending on the customer scenario, right? So a lot of emergencies, you see this tested on our side.
So bandwidth on demand is a promise of the system, definitely is something that is attainable with wireless underlays, LTE underlays and 5G underlays, but something that's maybe a little bit longer term for Comcast specifically. It's certainly an exciting potential of the platform, especially when you look at how you can have authorized applications request bandwidth. you know, and have the service essentially provisioned based on application need. That's fun to see.
We're starting to see hybrid as the new wide area network. It's kind of fun. When you're doing SD-WAN, you need to have a diversity of services underneath it.
You know, and the result is people are hybridizing their networks and they're using those hybrid elements to specifically tune to create a wide area network. I've got a remote site, needs to be up three months a year. I operate a fishing cannery. You know, shoot, I'm only going to use a wireless underlay for that, maybe satellite.
But I've got a key headquarters location. That is where I host my on-site data. This is the stuff that I feel is too sensitive for the cloud.
That's going to have maybe some dedicated fiber, maybe some waves. So you're starting to see customers hybridize their solutions so that they can right-size it for every size of branch that they have. Network functions via software, not hardware. I have to tell you guys kind of a funny story.
We patched. our firewall, you know, a couple of months ago. And the impact to the customer was nothing because these network functions are software-based, not hardware-based. We have the ability to sandbox them, to tune them, to change them, to update them without impacting the customer's uptime. And I think anybody who's, you know, upgraded a version of iOS or, you know, upgraded to a new firmware, you know, on their devices can understand that, you know, historically, that used to be a fairly big impact.
But as we start to see network functions become software, as we start to see their support become software, not hardware, we have the ability to kind of divorce what the customer is using from the specific hardware they use it on. And we can do things like, you know, do image backups, do duplications, you know, provide tested sandbox environments that are defined to whichever site the customer wants to define. That division between software and hardware It makes it very easy for us to be very, very creative with what we do with our systems.
We're building towards zero-touch configuration. You know, this is something that we're seeing the industry grow towards. For Comcast specifically, we are learning the inside of customer LAN environments.
We have found some pretty messy customers and some pretty exciting customers, right? But as time goes on and you start to see more algorithms, more network discovery protocols, all that stuff get folded into the system. You're going to see the configuration be a lot simpler, a lot easier to connect with. And then all of this is going to be powered by the universal customer premise equipment, that server in the customer environment, that edge server, network function virtualization, one of which is SD-WAN that is going to change the way our customers do networking. All right, go ahead and hit the next slide.
Josh, it's over to me. I can go ahead and pick it up from here. That's perfect.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Bill. Thanks, Josh.
So just carrying on a little bit more with some Gardner feedback, we did a webinar with them last week. And I thought this slide was interesting because I think we've all been hearing about the CAGR for SD-Way from a customer adoption standpoint. So you can see here that this is taking off. I've seen different studies showing that 50-60% of the enterprise and mid-market customers have already started a trial or have implemented it.
So hopefully, you know, those of you in the channel have been engaged, but the opportunity is massive and it can continue to grow. From a Comcast Business Solution Provider Program standpoint, we also do some research on our own. And one thing that we feel we have a competitive advantage of is around enabling our partners to really drive a lot of revenue around ActiveCore, which is our SDN platform, which can layer on additional NFVs and just the SD-WAN portion of it. Because we did some primary research, we went out and talked to the channel and we said, hey, when you do an SD-WAN deal, what does that revenue breakdown look like between the underlay in terms of incremental network?
Customer may have bonded T1s running three megs and they say, let's bring in 500 megs. And so they're able to bring in fiber or coax. A lot of them are doing managed services. They're MSPs and they're saying, you know what, I'll go ahead and manage this for you. $10 per site, $20 per site.
I'll make sure it's up, it's running, it's configured. If there's any problems, I'll go ahead and take care of it for you. Clearly, there's the recurring revenue from just the SD-WAN software and hardware, but then there's also pro services opportunities. So we're seeing a lot of our channel partners really drive significant revenue.
not just from the recurring commissions, but from everything else they can wrap around it. So I want to talk a little bit about how we enable you and support you. We've got a lot of great tools.
It really starts in my mind with training. We have a newsletter platform called the download where we actually push out twice a week new information on what's going on. But we also have this with that little SD-WAN tab there that contains training videos. It contains presentations both for kind of internal training as well as for talking to your customers.
case studies and references are all sitting up there. A lot of great tools for doing marketing demand gen so you can provide infographics. It's got white papers. So there's a lot of really good content that we make available to our channel partners to train themselves, educate their customers, and progress deals.
One of the areas that I think we've seen a lot of success is in our mobile app. So Josh talked a little bit about the digital experience. Well, One of the things we've seen great traction with is making this available to our channel partners where they can put it on their iPhone or their Android, go into demo mode, and then actually zoom in and out of the country and show all the physical locations and show sites up, down, impaired, packet loss, jitter latency.
A lot of really cool features that the customers are going, wow, I had no idea. And one of the case studies that... that Josh showed earlier, one of the wins, feedback we got from the partner was the number one thing that sold it was this handheld device and being able to be at his kid's soccer game at six o'clock and be able to see what was going on with the network and how it was working and not being, you know, tied down to an office computer, but being mobile and having access to all that.
So I highly recommend you pick up a copy of this and check it out because it's a great way to learn it and to... also show your customers. The next tool that I wanted to talk about for a second is called Channel Express. This is another one that makes it really easy to do kind of real-time education and real-time content from your mobile device when you're with your customers. So key questions to ask, key tools or assets or white papers that you can just push directly from your handheld device directly to your customer.
great feedback from from our partners in terms of enabling their sales efforts print point great tool for co-branding and and doing marketing so we'll have a series of of data sheets sales guides where you can drop your own logo your own call to action you can push it out via your social channels or through your direct mail efforts or just in in your customer meetings it'll actually make sure that they come back to you and you have control over kind of that sale. We're also very aggressive here with our SPFs. So in the SD-WAN space, we're currently doing a 3x MRR, which is very big dollars if you land 20, 30, 40 site networks.
So we really want to keep that as another differentiator for Comcast's business and for our solution providers that that incremental payout is pretty compelling. So, to recap, and then we can take some questions. We really feel that Comcast Business is differentiated and well positioned in enabling our partners and their customers to know more, control more of their network, understand their applications, and spend less.
We really do that through a couple things. One is Comcast Business has millions of business customers. We're really good at...
rolling trucks, we're really good at providing an outstanding experience, we're really good at marketing, and that's all stuff that you guys can leverage. Next is really the ease of management. So that digital experience is great for both setting up and configuring the network, as well as for troubleshooting or just being aware of any sites that may be running hot or there's any potential opportunities or for any downtime and having access to view that. Josh talked a little bit about TCO.
We think that being able to have that no ETF really lends itself to getting IOTs underway with customers. You know, put in the five site, let them kick the tires. We're seeing a huge conversion of those from an initial setup to a much larger deployment.
And lastly, the program supporting our partners is outstanding. We have sales engineers across the country that are available. for customer meetings or for training.
We have dedicated product sales experts like Josh. So he does a weekly or biweekly call that's kind of open-ended for the channel or for their customers to see the digital experience and kind of go through a demo. We also have solution architects.
So we have extremely technical people that help with the design and the management through a dedicated operations. seem to make sure that experience by customer is smooth and seamless for installation, whether it is fiber build or whether it's, you know, existing on net or coax type underlay. Again, this is nationwide, in footprint, out of footprint. You know, there's a lot of different underlay capabilities. So at the bottom there, I jotted down the solution provider program.
If you're not already working with us, that's a way that you can fill in a contact me and we'll get you to one of our master agents or one of our partner sales managers and then we also have dedicated uh sdn content off that as well so uh with that i want to just say thank you and um gerard wanted to see if you wanted to facilitate any questions or how you want to do that excellent excellent thank you very much um yeah any questions please submit them through the q a box in the in the um bottom of the zoom platform or the chat window here and and we can certainly feed those through. One question that I had during the presentation, you know, Josh mentioned some wins and where to target. Beyond public school systems, are you seeing any opportunities in the public sector right now?
Sure, that's a great question. So I would say public sector is kind of funny because, you know, people like the FCC have to decide if this is going to be eradable, you know, if this is going to apply for USF. You know, and all of the different programs associated with it and where they have said yes, there's a high degree of velocity.
Now, I would say that within Comcast, we do have a group that specifically focuses on the public sector. And if that's something that you have a high degree of expertise in and something that you think you can, you know, bring Comcast services to, you know, be sure to connect with us and we'll connect you up with that group. It's going to look a little bit more like a partnership. I know there's some organizations out there that you know, let agents kind of operate freely in that space. And there are certainly some simplicities with that model.
But if you're willing to go through that partnership, Comcast has a lot of plant and certainly a lot of potential to sell into that portfolio. So yeah, a lot of space in the public sector to capture a lot of market share. But we do have a group that we'd want to partner with to make sure that everything's collected and working together. Perfect. And now another question for you here.
You know, with a lot of people out there selling next generation communication services like UCaaS, maybe expand a little bit on how SD-WAN can support those services to ensure a positive experience for end users. Great question. And that is, you know, that is something that we see drive a lot of deals.
Usually when a customer comes to us, it's, you know, they've outgrown their WAN or They've launched a critical application, 70% of the time it's voice, or they just need to build in diversity and be resilient to failover. So to that second point, if somebody's got a next generation need for communication systems, they need to work with an APA, a RingCentral, an Evolve IP. If they've got a need to utilize these voice systems, the question inevitably comes up, well, how am I going to protect this?
How am I going to make sure it's a great experience? And we'll go pretty deep. So if we want to, you know, just take a look at all the SIP traffic on the customer network and make sure that that's duplicated over all four links, which is kind of the bludgeon way of doing redundancy.
You're going to have to work really hard to take that connection down, you know, then that's an option. But we also have customers that come to us and say, look, do you have the ability to, you know, essentially be co-located in? where our PBXs are located? Can you put a UCPE there or a virtualized CPE there, right?
And those are really fun conversations because then you can demonstrate to your users how you have end-to-end protection and visibility for their critical applications. And that's powerful if you can see the impact to their business when it goes down and you can protect that. So yeah, I've seen a lot of drivers in the voice space specifically towards moving to services like SD-WAN. Okay, another question for you here. One of my favorite topics is the security angle.
Can you talk maybe a little bit about how SD-WAN can enhance security at the branch location? Yeah, definitely. So, you know, I never want to sell against a CSO. That is something that I've run into in the past, where, you know, the chief security officer has spent 10 years, 15 years, you know, even just two years, really locking down and defining how a service is going to work.
And I'm not going to be able to walk in there and say, look, with software, I can do all that you can do, you know, get another certification, let's move on. So what I usually end up doing is if they've got a next generation firewall, but they can only afford to have it at the headquarters location and they're trying to figure out, shoot, I've got to do hub and spoke because that's the only way I can achieve my security policy. Then what I like to do is I like to say, look, we've got a layer three or four stateful firewall at those edge locations.
And what that enables you to do is to route the traffic that you can see. Right. So, you know, it's SIP. The DNS is not encrypted.
You know, this is phone. We're going to route that. We're going to duplicate that.
That goes, boom, right into the WAN or right out to the cloud or wherever it needs to go. But if something is, you know, deeply encrypted or it's, you know, a TCP port that we don't know about, an application we don't understand, let's send that back to your big iron firewall. Let's get that, you know, deep packet inspection, that SSL decryption. You know, let's really scrub that traffic and make sure that it is what it says it is or it is something critical before we send it to the broader network.
You know, so we also play nice. with some cloud integrations for cloud firewalls, some of which are super close to Comcast infrastructure. So if you don't have your own layer seven firewall and you need to start justifying that, then that's something that we can help you out with.
So if you've got layer seven needs, we can help you. If you have layer seven needs, but a big network and you don't want to buy an expensive firewall for everything, we can absolutely help you. And if you're just starting to think about security, we can show you a couple of options that make it.
very clear what we can do to protect your traffic. Okay. And to clarify, does the firewall included in your SD-WAN replace the client's standalone firewall?
It depends. So they have an option. So what I usually find is if they're using a layer three or four checkpoint firewall, TP-Link firewall, just something that maybe is a little bit more on the commodity edge of things, we'll do a...
you know, kind of a deep dive assessment with that customer. And we'll see if we can replicate that in our system. And if we can, there are some, you know, economics that become a little bit better if we use our firewalls, right? But on the flip side, if they've got that Palo Alto firewall or that FortiGate firewall, and they're doing lots of fancy stuff and they really like it, you know, we'll fold in behind that.
So certainly we've replaced in some cases, we've also supplemented. We have the ability to work in both scenarios. Okay, next, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the SD-WAN implementation process and provide a little bit of an overview for our... Absolutely. Absolutely.
Happy to do that. And then I'm also going to hit the question just before that, too, which is which SD-WAN device does Comcast use? Just because it's very, very quick. We use Versa underneath our system. Now, if you see our portals, it's not going to look a lot like Versa.
We think Versa is good for lots of things. It's incredible. But it does require some very, very specific tuning.
So we want to unlock the potential of that system, but not create a burden to the customer to be able to use it. And then I apologize. The question you just asked, I saw it disappear from the chat. Can you repeat it? Oh, there it is.
I'm sorry. Can you talk a bit about the implementation process? Perfect.
So the implementation process for us. I have a counterpart, his name is Bruce Wagoner, and he is dedicated exclusively to the channel, and you don't have to share. He is a solutions architect that came from our strategic team. And his particular gift, I mean, he did a 650 site deployment on Tuesday, Wednesday came to work for us. He's kind of an over-engineering resource for Comcast.
So I feel comfortable putting him in rooms with people with engineering patents. You know, people who sit on, you know, various seats in the MetraEthernet forum, very, very sharp guy, very, very fun to work with. And his involvement kind of shows the Comcast philosophy here, which is, you know, we're going to provide a solutions architect, you know, for most opportunities, it will be Bruce. He's going to really, or she, going to really get into the guts of the customer system, understand how it works, understand how our system works, you know, test. and work out a couple of SD-WAN devices, get that, we call it a golden config, that one that just works perfectly in the customer scenario, and then scale it out from there.
So customers are going to have an opportunity to provide a lot of guidance on how they want to see the SD-WAN implemented. They're going to have a resource working with them that deeply understand, intimately understands the technology. And you're going to... You know, really, you're going to have a lot of the ability to take the initiative, but have a backstop if you need it. In case you, you know, ask, hey, should I use, you know, Moss scores to route my voice traffic or should I use packet duplication?
What are my options here? So, you know, that's kind of the way that we really, really guard the customer experience for the implementation process. Hey, and still, I'd like to add just a couple quick things.
So one of the things we learned, you know, maybe a year ago was that we wanted to have dedicated operations people assigned to SD-WAN. So we really wanted to make sure that we had people that were just doing it over and over and over and over and getting really good experience with it because Most of our partners know us as an in-footprint provider, but when we rolled this out two years ago, we rolled it out over the top, giving us nationwide capabilities. So now we're getting really good at doing off-net, whether it's Fiber or Coax.
But we have a dedicated, fairly large group in Philadelphia of ActiveCore operations people. And then from a channel perspective, we sit down every two weeks and we look at every single deal and say, is this on track? Is this a good experience? And we really micromanage it.
So I think we've made great progress over the last year to really have additional depth in our operations capabilities for for implementations. Chris Winslow, Board Member For Chris Winslow, Board Member For that bill. Bill Meyers, CA OSDS, Okay.
Are there any other any other points that you want to address here, Joshua bill or any other any other questions that that come to mind. Common commonly asked questions. Definitely. Well, I see a question here, and I apologize if I answered it already by Anthony, you know, about the key applications and what we can do for application visibility. You know, Anthony, certainly if you want to connect with us on the side, I can demo all of the stuff that we're talking about.
You know, I like to kind of prove what our customer experience process is, but, you know, I like to sell slow and test things rather than move fast and break things. And what that looks like is, you know, putting an SD-WAN appliance in each of the customer's locations. Using that to get application visibility for over 3,000 different distinct applications. And then, you know, once we get an opportunity to start changing the underlay, changing the, you know, connectivity underneath the service, we can say, look, you know, over here, you got tons of voice. You know, you need to really practice that.
And we can use that MOS score to support that, you know, or MOS score to support that. Or over here, you got a ton of Facebook video. Is this your marketing team?
Or do you just have a group that's easily distracted? So I like to move slow, understand the customer's environment. And then when we go in to suggest changes, it's really based upon what we know they are doing.
And that's how you create a really strong relationship. So I guess from my standpoint, I just would like to close out with a request for next. steps and it's really two things one is we have local partner sales managers across the country so if you know yours great reach out to them uh ask them to come out you know take you to lunch and give you a little bit more detail if you don't know who that is uh feel free to reach out to me or to josh my email is william underscore steen s-t-e-e-n at comcast.com and i can get you to the right person or that url at the bottom of the page And if you get a chance, you know, play with that digital app because it really does impress people and it really kind of differentiates what we're doing. So with that, I think we're all set.
Okay. A big thank you to the Comcast business team, to Bill and Josh for joining us today, and to all of you for attending our presentation. Just a reminder, this webinar will be available on demand following the event.
So be sure to check your email or visit channelvisionmag.com slash webinars. For more information about Comcast business. please visit comcastbusiness.com.
Thanks. And we'll see you next time. Take care, everyone.