“We’re at a crossroads now, an inflection point in the channel,” Matt Fassnacht, VP and channel leader for Comcast Business, said in a Channel Partners TV (CPTV) interview. He explained this period requires telecoms and channel partners to adapt to stay ahead of industry trends.

“The channel, to me, is the canary in the coal mine as far as where the industry is going, where technology is going, where infrastructure is going,” Fassnacht told Channel Partners VP Bob DeMarzo.

Fassnacht said the inflection providers “a tremendous opportunity for Comcast to take the channel to what I see as the next chapter” as it strives to increase its share of Comcast Business’s $10 billion revenue from 10% to 30%. “As technology’s changing, the channel’s changing,” he said.

Fassnacht looked at the industry changes after moving into his current role in December 2023, and realized “the way we were structured is not going to take us into the next chapter the channels. So we made strategic bets on how we're going to allocate our resources, where we want to deliver a great experience to every channel partners that's out there. Every channel partner’s not the same. So we've got to go through a different experience to those that are playing in the security space versus those that just do your traditional connectivity. We wanted to make sure that we were structuring ourselves from a resource perspective to really go to not where the channel will be tomorrow, but three-to-five years down the road.”

Fassnacht, whose experience in the channel goes back to Sprint Wireline in the 1990s, also discussed:

• How a new generation of leaders are entering the channel – “A lot of folks I came up with are exiting, they’re retiring.”
• The biggest opportunity in the channel today is in the “white space” between the high end of SMBs and low end of the Fortune 1000.
• A diversity of partners. “A lot of new channel partners are coming into the space. I think there are some that really don't know what the traditional norms are from the past and are really looking from a forward-looking lens and saying, ‘Hey, I don't even really necessarily need to lead with connectivity, I’ll lead with overlay. I'm going to lead with security.’ And they just view it very differently.”

Watch the entire video for more insights.