Moving on Up: Cable Eyes Enterprise Sector

DENVER -- Cable Next-Gen Technologies -- After years of serving small and midsized businesses (SMBs), cable operators are ready to take their business services talents into the enterprise sector.

During Thursday's Cable Next-Gen Technologies & Services 2016 conference in Denver, Charter Communications' Scott Fairchild said that there was a "significant opportunity" for cable operators in the enterprise sector.

"There's a lot of market share that we haven't captured that we can capture with Ethernet Internet, voice and trunking services," said Fairchild, senior director of network products for Charter's Spectrum Business. "Our product portfolio will continue to change and that's close to our heart."

As recent entrants, cable operators have opportunities to introduce more sophisticated and new services, Fairchild said. Charter Communications Inc. is benefiting from putting functionality into the cloud, but Fairchild wasn't willing to go into the company's virtualization plans.

Fairchild said some of the challenges for delivering enterprise-grade business services included deploying fiber deep enough, and serving verticals, such as healthcare, inside and outside of Charter's footprint.

Fairchild said the enterprise verticals were similar to the ones that comprise the medium-sized sector, including healthcare, local government, education and financial services, but the needs of customers get more sophisticated at the enterprise level.

Jeff Johnson, director of MSO sales for Accedian , said serving enterprise customers brought on a whole different series of complexities. For healthcare, those complexities include the large size of files and HIPPA regulations. Johnson said cable operators need the "tools to test for success" as they move into enterprise services.

One of the lessons learned from serving SMBs that applies to enterprises, according to Fairchild, is that it's "less about the technology and more about how we use and price our products."

Taking a page out of its residential and SMB playbooks, cable operators can make inroads in the enterprise sector by simplifying the complexity for their customers, according to Fairchild.

— Mike Robuck, editor, Telco Transformation