In this Channel Partners Fast Chat, executive editor Craig Galbraith talks with Bill Steen, director of indirect channels and alliance partner marketing, Comcast Business, about how the cable company is helping partners be successful with software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN).

On Comcast’s approach to SDN and SD-WAN:

“We rolled out our SDN platform, called ActiveCore, about two years ago, so the company really had a unique position in that we didn’t have a layer 3 MPLS network. so we could really kind of start from scratch with the latest and greatest technologies.”

On how Comcast Business is supporting the channel to be successful:

“The channel is key to our success, so we’ve invested heavily in a number of things.The first one is training, and making sure we go out to our partner community and let them understand what our value prop is, whom to target, and what the key questions are to ask.”

On new SDN features that have come out in the last few months:

“There are a couple areas we’ve focused on. The one we’re most excited about is our digital experience — really, the portal. The portal has two flavors to it: the traditional laptop where you can go in and set all of your policies, set application prioritization, etc., but we also have a mobile device, a handheld, where you can jump in and see the status of your network.”

Watch our video above for the entire conversation.