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Comcast (News - Alert), a provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services recently launched an indirect channel sales program that will allow master agents and VAR’s (valued added resellers) to sell the company’s services.

Today, I had the chance to speak to Mike Saxby, chief strategy officer at TBI, about how the program is going so far.

I began the interview by asking Saxby why in his opinion, did Comcast decide to begin its partner program at this particular time. He responded that he believed the company saw the great amount of demand in marketplace.  “From what we have seen, they had done smaller data rollouts and were able to view and judge the demand in the marketplace. The Comcast strategy has been very solid in the enterprise space and small business space, and Comcast probably thinks the partner community could really fill the mid-market opportunities,” he said.

Because Comcast has contracted with TBI, TBI has seen an “overwhelming and significant response,” as well as a tremendous amount of interest, that are being followed by a huge amount of inquiries. TBI is currently processing a very high volume of quotes. “Even though we right at beginning stages of it, we are already starting to see a significant amount of order volume coming from the interest and quote activity,” Saxby stated.

The long term goals for TBI is to be the number one master agent, while the goals of the overall program are to the show the Comcast team that the partner community can sell into the mid-market space and can also potentially sell into the upmarket space, and successfully also penetrate the small business space. “This shows the versatility of the partner community and success we bring, and then in doing so our goal would be for Comcast to roll out additional products and services to the partner community such as fiber,” Saxby added.  

Currently Comcast is only allowing TBI to sell business class internet, business class voice, PRI’s, and television—with TBI’s bundled packages including things like web posting, antivirus and Microsoft (News - Alert) Sharepoint that are essentially different kinds of components that are bundled into it. Currently however, TBI is not able to sell the Comcast fiber product.

TBI was just lifted of its order limitations and the request for Comcast services have been booming.  For the initial rollout, Comcast placed an order limitation on master agencies to make sure the partner experience and the end-user customer experience all went off without a hitch. Saxby said, “I think it was a very smart strategic move by their staff to say—let’s not just flood the system immediately with orders, let’s kind of create a funnel and monitor it to make sure everything goes as planned.”

Within about a week of doing business with the three master agents, Comcast quickly came back and said everything was going great as planned, so the order limitation only lasted about a week. Now the order limitation has been lifted and the master agent’s are free to submit as many orders as they would like.

I asked Saxby why he thinks Comcast chose TBI as one of the company’s to act as its master agent and he responded, “I think they went through a very long interview process and looked at variety of different qualifications from everything from reputation in the industry and length in the industry, to the number of partners and quality of partners. Comcast definitely conducted a very in-depth review of back office and process systems, and then went through a qualification process to narrow it down. At the end of this lengthy process, Comcast chose 3 master agencies for its partner program.  I feel a large portion of decision to choose TBI had to do with the people we have at our organization, very specifically in the back office followed by the partners we have. These were the two major contributing factors to Comcast’s decision.”

“Comcast chose other master agencies as competitors including Telarus and Intelisys Communciations, but they are definitely are our friends as well.  They are friendly competitors­ and I think Comcast did a very good job of choosing what I would consider to be a good group of master agents,” Saxby commented.

When Comcast first announced its indirect channel sales program, Saxby said in a statement, “This is significant for the channel. It isn’t too often that a $70 billion company [Comcast Corp.] enters the channel and launches a partner program," said Mike Saxby, chief strategy officer for TBI, a master agency that has been selling cableco services from Time Warner (News - Alert) Cable Business Class for a few years and from Charter for the past six months. “This means our partners and the channel will have more choices. Comcast providing alternative access to the premises gives the channel increased end-user opportunities."

I asked Saxy to respond to this statement he made at an earlier time and he responded, “I can’t think of another company that could come into the channel today that is the size of Comcast. From a telco perspective, all the major telcos players have a partner program. Comcast being the largest cableco, is really one of only two, the other being Cox (News - Alert)—to launch a nationwide partner program. It really is just not this often that an event like this happens.”

“An event like this might not happen again for another 10 years.  I think it was a very unique time and all of us will look back 10 years from now and be like wow it was really cool to be on the ground level of the Comcast indirect partner program. Their differences from telcos are very significant to our community. As to the value proposition for why you sell them, is a completely redundant alternate path that doesn’t mean you only sell them for disaster recovery, but obviously If you are selling telcos as your primary having a completely redundant path is really a major benefit and/or starting to sell cablecos now as a primary have same capabilities and infrastructures. I think Comcast coming into the channel is obviously going to be the biggest and most significant development of 2011 by far.”