Ep.140- Beyond the Network: Unveiling Expert Secrets! Pt. 2/3 with Joe Austin
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling technology solutions. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Hey everybody, welcome back. Today we are on talking about unveiling secrets, expert secrets beyond the network. Today on With Us, we’ve got Mr. Joe Austin, who is VP of Global Solutions Architecture at Comcast Business. Joe, welcome on, man. Hey Josh, thanks for having me today.
Joe, we’re excited to have you on, man. You know, that title, that size of company, you see a lot of things, and I’m sure we’re going to gleam into what I think will be super helpful for our partners. So excited to kind of share some of these insights, man. So if you’re ready, let’s jump in. Yeah, cool. Can’t wait. Yeah, let’s go. All right. We like to start off always with your story. How did you get into this field? Were you destined for technology, winding path, linear path? What is it?
Yeah, sure. So about me, I have an undergraduate degree from Pitt in Computer Science. I have a master’s degree in Strategic Management and Executive Leadership from Penn State’s Meel College of Business.
And for a few years, I even taught the telecom and networking classes at one of Pitt’s branch campuses. So that’s kind of my educational background, but started in telecom in 2003, right out of college. I was providing Tier 1 technical support for residential internet customers for Adelphia Cable. I did that for a few months, transitioned from their call center to Adelphia’s network operations center, where I was a network engineer working in their backbone, doing maintenance work and network upgrade work. From there, I transitioned from Adelphia Cable to what was known at the time as Adelphia Business Solutions, which also became known as Telcove through some name changes. I went into Telcove as an IP engineer. And the day I started at Telcove from my transition from Adelphia was the day that level 3 communications announced the purchase of Telcove. So I always say at the time I was probably about 24 years old and was not even qualified at the time probably to be an IP engineer at Telcove. And now I’m an IP engineer at level 3, which was at the time the largest internet backbone company in the world. So that was kind of how I got started. And I spent 10 years of my career at level 3 from jobs in IP backbone engineering to for four years I was level 3’s lead security and network solution architect for the eastern half of the US. And my final position at level 3, I ran go to market strategy and sales enablement or level 3 security and networking product portfolio.
Since then I’ve been here at Comcast Business now for 10 years, or almost 10 years, and the 10 years I’ve been here, I’ve been in the same position for the whole entire time as leading the Comcast Business Solution Architecture team and I would be remissed if I didn’t talk a little bit about my team and what we do. So the Solution Architecture team at Comcast Business is made up of subject matter experts in different areas. So I have security architects, voice architects, Wi-Fi architects, professional service architects, and they work with our customers and partners like Calaris on building customized solutions for our customers and with our partners. So yeah, that’s a little bit about me and what we do here at Comcast Business.
I love it and we’re going to jump into that and kind of prove that this is not the Comcast you knew 10 years ago, it’s not the Comcast that you knew 5 years ago. But you did say something that I have to go back on because I can sort of relate to this early on historic career path.
Was it residential support?
What was the word that reminded me? Yeah, so tier 1 residential technical support for our IP internet customers at Adelphia Cable, correct? So
what is the, I want to say patience, but what is the biggest thing that you learned? What did that role teach you with his technical mind jumping into that path?
Sure, I mean, that was my first job out of college, right? So at the time at Adelphia Cable, every new employee went to school at what they called Adelphia University.
And then after you went through Adelphia University, you learned the billing platforms, you learned the provisioning platforms. And then if you were lucky enough, you got to go to school for two more weeks to be able to do tech support. And that’s what I was doing at the time was tech support. And Adelphia at the time taught you how to talk to customers, how to troubleshoot issues linearly and really just kind of even how to answer the phone, how to greet people. So yeah, you learn a lot when you’re working with customers on a day to day basis and really how to be patient because they want their internet backup. That’s why they’re calling in.
Yeah, I love it. I think there’s probably a lot of things that you learned in that period because of how many calls you go through, how many different things you learn, the way to talk to people. I mean, that’s the stuff that sticks with you for the rest of your life. And a lot of the, like the the Occam’s Razor theory, just trying to not make it too complicated. It’s probably something really basic, good things to learn along the way that just will continue to help us forever.
Yeah, rebooting your cable modem picks the issue like nine out of 10 times.
That’s right. Clear the cash, clear the cookies, set the search, reboot the modem, then call me back in on your other. I did it in dial updates, right? So call me back in if this doesn’t work, you know, kind of thing. All right, so let’s talk about Comcast, right? I mean, certainly everybody knows Comcast is this monster for cable and TV. But, you know, talk to us a little bit about kind of the go to market strategy for Comcast, how you feel that, you know, your, your breadth and depth is expanding. So we’re going to get into products here in just a second. But maybe just walk us through, how do you go to market? How do you help people understand all the things that you guys do and standing out from who might not have been a competitor before and is a competitor now?
Yeah, so Comcast business, we really divide the market into two main segments, we have our small business solutions, and then we have our enterprise customers. And our small business segment that really started in around 2006. So almost a 20 year old business unit now in business practice. And they’re really focused on the small business solution side, to really focus on customers that are inside of our connectivity footprint. So where we actually have Comcast cable Comcast fiber based solutions. Around 2014 Comcast made the move into the mid market and then the large enterprise segment, which included in that is the Fed gov space. So kind of starting around 2006 making that next big leap in 2014, which again is the about 10 years ago when I came on board with Comcast was right around that time we were making that transition. So in the small business solution segment, our goal is to make it as easy as possible for our customers to do business with us. So we try to meet our customers where they’re at. And maybe that’s through buying locally from a sales rep who you know, lives in your community or being able to buy services on our website, we just try to meet our customers where they’re at. And that’s been a winning formula now for like I said for the last 20 years.
But if we talk about the large enterprise segment, right? And where’s Comcast moving and where is our growth coming from it is from that large enterprise segment. And that’s really what gets me excited at Comcast business what we’re doing in that large enterprise space.
But I said earlier Comcast business, we went into this large enterprise space around 2014.
And really what we did at the time was we brought products and solutions that were different from the Lex. And if you talk about pre 2014 most enterprise customers they were buying solutions from the Verizon and AT&T’s of the world. And then Comcast business we came in with fundamentally different solutions. We came in with a course with connectivity that was diverse, but we didn’t have a lot of the legacy technology debt like T1’s and some of those other types of technologies weighing us down. And so we were able to bring the right solutions at the right time to the market. And that’s really kind of where we grew up to today.
And so like some of the antidotes around that right so vertical systems group, for example, they have come out with their SD-WAN leaderboard report. And since 2018 Comcast we have been the fastest growing managed SD-WAN provider within VSG and VSG now in their SD-WAN leaderboard Comcast we’ve grown to be the second largest SD-WAN managed service provider. So you can kind of see how we’re only about 10 years in this large enterprise space, but we’re growing quite rapidly.
Yeah, I love that. And I think something else to call out too that again, this wasn’t the case in years past is that I want to make sure partners understand is that you can do teaming with Comcast. Right no longer are is indirect here and direct is over here and you know, we’re gonna we’re gonna fight each other to the duel.
I love what you know, Matt and channel team over there has done and I think that’s just that’s going to be incredible for growth of teaming opportunities, right? Partners love to team. They love to work with the reps. And so, you know, kudos to you guys for for getting that, you know, dialed in and I just we’re super excited about that.
Yeah, and I think that’s probably the most important takeaway from this session that we’re going to have today in this podcast here and was something that I was going to close with but I think it’s exactly that right like if you’re a if you’re a channel partner, think of Comcast more than just connectivity solutions. We’re more than just broadband and Ethernet. Think of providing a full stack solution to your customers. That’s connectivity plus SD WAN plus security plus voice plus even professional services such as installation maintenance break fix type services.
Yeah, yeah. And we’re going to come. I love the carrot dangle it. We’re going to come right back. Yeah.
Before we go into products, we got a lot of products to talk about here. So flashback these last 10 to 15 years hard lesson you’ve learned something or maybe you’ve gotten help from a great mentor share that with the broader audience here.
Sure. Well, so first just want to kind of call out. I’ve been here over nine years now at Comcast. I’ve had the same manager for the last nine years. So I report to Comcast businesses chief technical officer. His name is Amit Verma. And personally, I could not have asked for a better mentor and he’s taught me a ton about managed services, how to work with customers in this space, how to come up with pricing and solutions that really meet customers need. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention on it or kind of right off the top, but also from kind of a mentorship program perspective, taking a little bit of a step back in my career. So about 14, 15 years ago, I mentioned earlier how I made that transition from network engineering into sales and it’s quite a change when you move to a world of network engineering where it’s all internal. You’re working on these large complicated projects and now you’re working with customers. You’re working with sales reps. You’re working with partners. And so when I was at level three, I had a vice president at the time. His name was Bill Wanaka and one of like the best mentors early in my career that I could have had. And what Bill taught me was really how to think differently when you communicate with customers, when you communicate with business partners and the way network engineers communicate with each other on a day to day basis is different than how you communicate with customers. And partners. So just the communication was one thing that he taught me. And the second thing that’s another kind of valuable lesson that kind of dovetails from the communication is how you work with customers and partners is different than how you work with engineers to basically like how you send emails, how you give more frequent updates. If you have a customer, your customer wants to know you’re working and making sure that you’re constantly giving them the information that they need. So really that communication, how to work differently as I moved from a network engineer into sales was maybe one of the most important lessons learned that I got early in my career.
I love it. Those are awesome. I love asking that question. Everybody’s got such a different answer. It’s good.
All right. Time for products, man. So I don’t think people are aware of how many products you guys have. Right. When we talk about full one stop shop, I’m going to I’m going to rattle off these and I’m going to I’m going to get yelled at because we’re just going to do some acronyms here. So we might have to dive into these a little bit. So we’re talking. Let’s see. SD-WAN and SASSY. We’re talking MDR on the endpoint, managed detection response. We’re talking the EDR as well. We’re talking the new relationship with Rapid 7. You’ve got 4G, 5G. You’ve got cradle point. You got millions of Meraki APs out there. You got the connectivity. So there’s a lot of products there. And it’s almost like Comcast set out to say, what all does a business need? Okay, cool. Let’s be the shop for that. Right. So break all this down for us. I’d love to hear the OEMs, you know, as you can just kind of remind everybody, hey, if you think of you hear these OEMs, think of us. So just walk walk us through some of this.
Yeah. And we also had another recent announcement press release that we’re super excited about with a partnership with Starlink where we’re now able to offer low orbit satellite solutions to our customers. And we think this is a one of the one of the kind unique offering where Comcast business as a large company can now bring this unique solution to the marketplace. And so exactly what you said, right? We’re trying to figure out exactly what products that our customer segments need to be successful. And that’s what we want to offer them. And whether it’s MDR, EDR, or SD-WAN, SASE, or Starlink from a connectivity perspective, trying to meet our customers where they’re at in their business goals. But yeah, talking about some of the OEMs and what we do there. And I mentioned earlier how we’re one of the largest and one of the fastest growing managed SD-WAN providers.
And how we do that is being technology agnostic and not saying you have to go with a Kado solution or you have to go with a Meraki solution or you have to go with a Fortinet. We try to select the right solution that fits our customers’ needs. And so we do offer Cisco Meraki and Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and Aruba SD-WAN and Cradlepoint solutions. And our Fortinet SD-WAN solution is available globally. Nobody today, no, there’s no official third party leaderboards or anything for SASE services. But we do believe we are in the top few for managed SASE as well. When you look at the total number of sites under management from a SASE perspective. And it’s the same thing. We try to be as flexible as possible with our SASE offerings. And we have a globally available Fortinet solution. And we partner with Palo Alto with their Prisma solution, etc, etc. So the idea is being able to take the different SD-WAN solutions that are available in the industry, marry them up with the right security solutions, and then come together with our customers to provide a solution for them and not trying to pigeonhole them with a different, with a specific technology.
And we believe that’s one of our big differentiators in our space. And it’s really what has allowed us to grow. And so it really is being agnostic when it comes to that hardware solution and those vendors.
I love it. You know, the acquisition, you know, the the masergy thing, that was a great name in the space, great pickup by Comcast. How’s that? I mean, if you look at kind of what that’s propelled you into maybe talk to us a little bit about, you know, what is the addition of something like even a rapid seven? I mean, what does that what does that mean? And what does that empower you guys to do? How does that help build even stronger of a portfolio?
Yeah, so so maybe the best thing we got from the masergy acquisition is the people that joined Comcast. They just had some awesome people over there, great people, some some super smart. They are both on the engineering side, on the sales side, on the architecture side. And from a partner perspective, right, when you start thinking about the channel, they were really mature in the channel space and leverage the channel really well. So I think some of those items is what masergy brought to the table outside of just their solutions, right? We can talk about the solutions and what they do there from global connectivity and having a 70 global SD-WAN and Stasty Pops around the world. And some of the things that are outside of the people that they brought. But but yeah, from from a people perspective, I don’t think there was a better relationship that we could have formed between Comcast and a third party company. When you think about how that integration is when and and being able to work hand in hand with that team now. And typically, if you talk to somebody at Comcast, now you’ll never hear the term masergy anymore. Everything has been integrated from a technology portfolio from a sales portfolio. And it’s really kind of that one Comcast, so to speak, when it comes to us providing global managed security services. So but you start talking about some of these other vendors and what we can provide the partner community.
Comcast is such a big company, right? And you think about the size of Comcast. And when you start thinking about what we do in this space, we have awesome relationships with these different vendors. So we’re super close to Cisco and from like a Meraki perspective, for example, I sit on the Meraki customer advisory council.
My direct boss, Amit Verma, who’s our CTO, he’s done ford and that’s customer advisory council, etc, etc. So we have these top level relationships and we can bring those to bear as well. When we’re working on deals with our partners to make sure we have the right pricing, that we have the right solutions, that we have the right support and backing from those OEMs.
I just remember back in the day being excited when we had coax and you guys announced HFC coax, right? That was game changing. So here we are.
And I have been talking about the advancements we’ve been making on the coax side and being able to do 10 gigs of bandwidth across coax. We’ve really just been focusing on those over the top technologies.
Yeah, no, a lot here a lot. Love, love unpacking that great stuff there. Let’s, let’s push this into an example. So, so walk us through an example where you got brought in. What was the tech stack or business problems before and then really how did that environment, you know, did they know exactly what they needed? How the environment look after?
Yeah, so I’m just gonna give a specific example without saying the customer name, but for the last two years, we’ve been working with a large retailer. And this large retailer during, as you can imagine, kind of during the pandemic period, they were going through quite a transition. They had a lot more customers coming into their stores. They were also adding digital aspects to their stores around having a brand new mobile app and couponing and a number of different initiatives that their marketing teams were bringing to their customers. And the network needed to support that. And so from an underlay perspective at the time, we started transitioning this retailer from broadband based services to Ethernet based services, being able to bring in those additional SLAs around uptime, being able to bring in higher speeds of over a gig into retail locations to support hundreds of customers being in their stores at a time. And that’s just on the connectivity side. And then what we really focused on was from an SSE perspective, building them out a custom SSE solution within the Comcast data centers and Comcast, we have seven main SSE locations around the United States. And we were able to leverage these locations, create VPN tunnels from the store back into the seven and increase the uptime and the resiliency of their network. And then the other thing they were doing at the same time, I was talking about how they were bringing new applications into the stores. Those applications lived in the cloud. And so what we started doing was from our SSE locations, building dedicated interconnects, using our cloud connectivity providers, using our relationship with Equinex to build connectivity into several major cloud providers. And so really revamping this large retailer from the ground up, increasing the connectivity, bringing diversity from a connectivity perspective, building a custom SSE solution that had some of these advanced cloud connections to not just one cloud provider, but dozens of cloud different providers. And that was something that we were very proud of. It was something that we were able to stand up relatively quickly when you talk about migrating a whole retailer’s SD-WAN environment and SSE environment into the Comcast data center and into our network.
Love it. Love it. All right. So today’s track is about talking to an expert here, talking to experts in the space. And there are secrets that you learn along the way. So you’ve seen a lot, right? I mean, as you look at this over the last little while, you think about, okay, our partners are listening to this, try to figure out how can they take what they’re learning today and go help their customers, their prospects with that. So knowing that’s the frame up here, what’s your best kept secret in this space that you want to share with partners here?
Yeah, so I’m going to share a term that is kind of like an SAT type word, but it’s something that I kind of live by when I work with customers and how I think about solutioning. And something that I try to do and convey to my team is as they work with customers is to be altruistic. And really what that means, and if you think of being altruistic around working with customers and working with the designs, it’s really putting the customer first. And thinking about from a customer perspective, what is the right solution? What is the best solution that’s going to make your customer successful? And then backing in to the products that you offer. And I think a lot of times, us as technologists, we are predisposed to thinking we know what the best technology is or the best solution is every time we’re walking into a new customer environment. But that’s just not the case. And every customer is at a different spot on their journey, right? And I mentioned earlier about meeting the customer where they’re at with SD-WAN and security. And I think if there’s kind of that one secret, that one special sauce, it’s not to go in predisposed. And if you have a vendor or an OEM that right at the beginning is saying, “Hey, our solution is the best solution out there. We’re going to meet all the remote access needs. We’re going to meet their security needs. We’re going to meet their SD-WAN needs or connectivity needs.” That is probably not the provider or the OEM that you’re going to be able to trust. But really talking to the customer, first understanding their goals, and then figuring out how your products and solutions can meet their requirements. I would say that is kind of the number one thing is always putting the customer first and then working through your products and your solutions. And there may be a time that you might not have the best product for them. And I think being able to tell your customer at the same time, “I don’t have the best solution for you right now, but I know this vendor does.”
That customer is always going to be there, right? They’re always going to come back. And if you’re able to be honest and open with them, that’s really how you build a long-term partnership. And you’re not just a vendor who’s trying to sell something to them. So hopefully, if I could share one thing, that’s something that I always live by. And I always try to have my team do as well.
Good stuff. We’d love to hear, you know, we’re starting to get a lot of good feedback on this podcast of kind of what people want, what they like, what’s helping them. For the listeners out there, I would love to see everybody leverage on this episode. Leverage the comments section. Do you want to see more secrets like this? Do you want to see more product information? Do you want to see us dive deeper? We’d just love to keep hearing the feedback from everybody as we go through these because I think, Joe, you’ve dropped a mix of both really good stuff today. So again, just go in, drop us a comment, let us know what you’d like to see, and we’ll just keep building this for the audience.
Okay, so as we get to the final couple thoughts here, we’re going to talk about AI, right, for just a quick second. So a lot of AI, a lot of productization. Every org is building products in a different way. But maybe talk to us just about how is Comcast leveraging, or really what is Comcast doing to make yourselves better with regard to AI?
Sure. So first, I mean, from a Comcast perspective, when you think about AI and everything we’re doing, and Comcast is such a huge organization, we’re working on AI in a number of different areas. And we have a group within Comcast that is specifically just researching AI methodologies and how we can leverage AI. In the group within Comcast, one of the great things about them is we’re actually able to leverage them, and we’re able to have them have conversations with you from Telaris or with our leading partners and things to that effect. And you can actually learn from our AI team. But outside of that, some of where we’re going and what we’re going to be doing around AI is, and if you think about how AI can provide a better customer experience within Comcast business, so being able to leverage AI for self healing networks, for example, or using AI to be able to correlate data points to understand where network impacts are happening, so that we can resolve them faster. And those are the areas where I think, really in the near term, AI is going to be used and we’re working with a number of the OEMs right now. And some of the OEMs have some pretty cool solutions when it comes to AI that they’ve built into their products. And, for example, Juniper just recently launched on their Mist Wi-Fi, their their Marvis Mini solution, which gives some AI capabilities back through the network for self healing. We’re going to be doing some of the same thing on our side. So earlier, we joked around my days when I was doing customer support and having to reboot modems and reboot devices. But what if you had an AP that went offline and you were able to automatically reboot it or you had a cable modem that went offline and you were able to leverage AI to auto reboot that or you were able to see degradation in the network and be able to route around it. And so that’s where we’re going to be leveraging AI over the next several months and kind of in the near term, to be able to bring a better customer experience to our Comcast business customers.
Yeah, I love that. For seemingly basic things, right, things that you’d think, oh my gosh, we still need this. I mean, I remember, you know, when we were building infrastructure, you know, Linux based backbone infrastructure and you know, you add enough services, you add enough databases, you add enough of these things, right? These things start to get bogged down, a server struggles or some read writes cause problems and that just kind of lingers and lingers lingers forever. You would have to write in cron jobs into this Linux stuff to reboot it on Sunday at XYZ time automatically, right? You wouldn’t think you’d want your server to be rebooted, but a little reboot goes a long way, as we’ve learned early on. So yeah, I love, love hearing that. Love seeing you guys be proactive.
Yeah, and leveraging AI to understand we just don’t want to reboot the server during a peak time, right? So if it is a small amount of packet loss or if it’s something that you can get through, the AI needs to be smart enough that, hey, we’re not going to reboot it now, but we’re going to reboot it when we’re at 2% utilization and we’re not going to have as big of an impact, right? So there’s a lot of ways that AI can just create a smarter network. Yeah.
All right. Final couple thoughts here as we get wrapping up. So advice for the partners. So they’re there. Maybe they want to dive deeper into any of these journeys that we’ve talked about into infrastructure, into security, the network, any of those. What’s your advice for them to stay in tune or how would you encourage that?
Yeah, so I think it’s important to understand that both Telaris and Comcast have a great number of resources that the partners can leverage. You can always reach out to your Comcast partner manager. Your Comcast partner manager is going to be able to get you in touch with our sales engineering organization, our solution architecture team. We have a security overlay organization here at Comcast that is experts in the EDR and MDR space. So being able to leverage the resources that are available to you, both through Comcast and through Telaris, I think is super important. The easiest way to get a hold of the Comcast partner community is through email and we can provide that email address to you. Or you can always go to Comcastbusiness.com and find out about all the different products that Comcast business has to offer.
Awesome. All right, Joe. Final thoughts.
So look out to the future. Bust out your crystal ball as you look forward here in the next one to two years. What are the innovations that you’re most looking forward to in the market and of course at Comcast? Yeah,
so again, I mean, I would be remiss if I was not talking about connectivity at Comcast.
So that is kind of our bread and butter, right? That’s what Comcast is known for. And we haven’t talked much about connectivity. So Comcast being able to do 10 gigs of bandwidth over a cable modem, over Coax, I think is just going to be a huge differentiator to the industry. Us being able to bring Ethernet solutions over a Coax or over a any kind of connection, whether it’s fiber, whether it’s Coax, but giving our customers an Ethernet based solution with SLA is, I think is going to be a game changing from a connectivity perspective. Outside of connectivity and what we’re doing there from a Comcast perspective, we’re growing out a footprint. And this is something that’s new to us that we have not been really leveraging in the past. But previously, we were really focused in the Comcast cable markets. So those markets where we actually had fiber in the ground had Coax in the ground and we’re delivering services, but now being able to bring those services across the United States. And then from kind of that over the top technology, the overlay technology, what I see is happening right now is if you look at the SD-WAN offerings in the industry, you look at the SSE offerings in the industry, you look at the voice offerings in the industry.
You’re going to see these solutions coming together more and having, there’s terminology in the industry today,
like one vendor SASE, one provider SASE. But I think what the industry is going and where the industry is going to be is you’re going to be able to use best in class SD-WAN solutions that meet your need with best in class SSE solutions that are able to integrate those applications and whether the application is going to be a good way to integrate those applications.
Or voice or Microsoft Teams or connectivity to certain cloud providers, you’re going to start seeing those come together and be more seamless. Right now, if you have kind of an all-star or managed service provider like Comcast, you might be able to get one of those solutions built for you. But I think those are going to be coming together even more over the next few years.
Love it, man. All right. That’s a lot of good nuggets. They’re packed in 30-ish minutes. So Joe, that’s it, buddy. I really appreciate you coming on, man. All right. Cool. Perfect. All right. Joe Austin, VP of Global Solution Architecture at Comcast Business.
As always, wherever you’re coming to us from, Spotify, Apple Music, be sure, go follow so you get these drops every Wednesday when they come out. Until next time, I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus. And this is Next Level BizTech Beyond the Network, Expert Secrets.