Mary Huss, publisher of the San Francisco Business Times, hosted a conversation with business leaders to discuss the role of technology in corporate growth and how organizations can best prepare themselves for acceleration. Mary was joined by Kelly Ahuja, CEO of Versa Networks, and Jeff Lewis, Vice President of SDN Products and Operations at Comcast Business.
During their dialogue, they discussed the complexities of growth, how to be both proactive and reactive to expansion opportunities, how to maneuver quickly, and how to minimize “growing pains” to optimize expansion opportunities. Whether growth is a function of the business lifecycle, industry trends, mergers/acquisitions, or timely market opportunities, solid growth strategies require companies to be prepared for the long term and also opportunistic in the short term.
MARY HUSS: As we emerge from the pandemic, where should companies be looking for opportunities to propel their businesses forward, and what should they be wary of?
KELLY AHUJA: The pandemic has really changed many aspects of life. The most important factor is that the way we work and where we work has changed not just for the near term, but probably forever. That creates tremendous opportunities for companies like Comcast Business and myself. Why? There are structural tailwinds that we’ve seen coming out of the pandemic. First, the shift to cloud and multi-cloud. Not just one cloud, but multiple clouds. Second, the workforce is no longer solely coming in to the office. They’re connecting from anywhere and everywhere, not just in their home cities. They could be traveling and connecting as well.
What’s changed is that in the past, only a small percentage of the workforce would be connecting remotely into workloads or applications that were in a private data center. Today, a majority of the workforce is connecting from any particular location and coming into these workloads or applications at any given time. That structural tailwind of cloud adoption, as well as a hybrid workforce, has significantly changed how companies look at what they need to do.
This also presents opportunities. For companies like Versa, it’s a great way to take our solution and offer it differently, so that Comcast Business or similar companies can leverage that and make it available to their customers. With the pandemic, there were many companies that rose up, such as clinics to do testing, which presented growth opportunities.
JEFF LEWIS: Pre-pandemic, I personally participated in many forums where we talked about the digital transformation. Everybody was trying to figure out and understand, what was this digital transformation? In my experience, it was the precursor to really move and adopt a lot more access of services and storage of cloud capabilities.
We saw a massive shift into the cloud during the pandemic. People weren’t in the office anymore, trying to maintain access to solutions that were sitting behind corporate firewalls. If it hadn’t disintegrated, it was moving away very, very quickly, and businesses needed distributed security. They needed security following the user as they were accessing these cloud services, as this became much more prevalent because they’re not sitting in the corporate environment.
You could be home. You could be anywhere for that matter, but you’re accessing the same information for that business. I like to think that we’re post-pandemic, but businesses are really following through on the hybrid model. That idea of security, especially when you’re accessing cloud services, is enormous.
MARY HUSS: Based on what you were just saying, where do you see us going from here, and what will be the impact on the pace of innovation going forward?
KELLY AHUJA: The pace of innovation continues to accelerate. Why? Because it’s a business necessity. We found many different ways of doing the same things that we were doing, but we found ourselves being more productive during the time of the pandemic. Simple examples, Mary. For example, my team didn’t have to commute to the office, so they had an extra hour perhaps in the morning, an extra hour in the afternoon to choose other activities or do more work.
But at the same time, they were able to take small breaks during the course of the day, just to walk away and take a breather and then be more productive as well. The work environment and the way we work certainly changed, but at the same time, those aren’t near-term changes. Those are structural tailwinds as I mentioned, even in the way we work. Why? Because now everyone is working remotely. Everyone’s working in this hybrid area and that has actually continued to drive even more change.
JEFF LEWIS: It may surprise you, but during the first six months of the pandemic really gripping all of us, we had our highest output on activations for all of our customers. It was shocking. We’re a service provider. We provide transport, which is critical to services like what Kelly offers, which is sometimes in the industry known as an over-the-top solution. You must have access to the internet or access to a network in order to reap the benefits of what Kelly’s company and similar companies offer to customers.
MARY HUSS: As these solutions get ever more complex, what are some of the top technology-oriented considerations when it comes to growth? What do companies need to take into consideration?
JEFF LEWIS: What you’re finding a lot more of in today’s world are managed services, smart self-installation type considerations. At Comcast Business, we simplify it all the way down such that we’re in the headache reduction business. It sounds like a tagline, but when you actually sit there and you work with your customers, the less burden you can put on them as you bring them up into their new service experience, the happier they are, the more they trust you, the more of a bond you form, and then you just grow from there.
KELLY AHUJA: To add to that, most businesses and companies don’t have the luxury of accessing internal resources or experts in some of these areas. So they do rely on partners to help them. They’re looking for three main factors, which optimize these innovations and technologies. One is to simplify. What do I need to do? Second is to scale, because if I’m growing, I’m scaling my business, my number of users or employee base, or the number of sites in anything I cover. The third is to secure.
MARY HUSS: These last two years, unpredictability has been the norm. I’m curious how the pandemic and even the geopolitical environment have affected business priorities.
JEFF LEWIS: Number one, two, and three priority is security. Businesses want flexibility. We are seeing higher demand on bandwidth. Customers are consuming more, but they want flexibility to be remote in a dispersed and secure cloud access environment.
MARY HUSS: You’ve had many examples of how this partnership works, but I’d like to hear more about examples that describe partnerships and how you’re putting those to use.
JEFF LEWIS: The clearest one that we would like to offer is the partnership between Comcast Business and Versa Networks. We found Versa Networks several years ago after an exhaustive search, and we weren’t just looking for technology. We were really looking for partners that understood us, but also people that understood growth and network services. There weren’t many businesses that actually appreciated and understood what Comcast Business was trying to achieve and accomplish.
KELLY AHUJA: We’ve had a very strong partnership with Comcast Business for many years. We understood what they were looking for. We innovated technology that was needed for their part in Comcast Business, but that actually resulted in some growth opportunities for us. Jeff looked for a solution and we said, “We can solve that problem.”
MARY HUSS: Congratulations on a successful partnership. By the dynamics, it seems like a very collaborative partnership and a lot of focus on innovation and solving problems. What makes you the most optimistic about the next 18 months? Is there a fear or a caution relative to what’s ahead of us as businesses?
JEFF LEWIS: Newly introduced technology innovations take time. It’s not for the faint of heart. I’ve learned that the easy way and the hard way over the years. I am also eternally optimistic. Maybe that’s why I’m always embracing the new hard technology and bringing it into the new fold.
What we have seen over the last several years is now mainstream, when you’re no longer pushing, but customers are pulling. You know you’ve got something valuable when customers are adapting and evolving, and starting to say, “Hey, I want this, or I want that.”
KELLY AHUJA: We’re living in a very dynamic world, and we continue to go across the globe and see different events happening. But fundamentally if you step back, even with any geopolitical or pandemic or any kind of challenges that we faced, there are structural tailwinds that we’re seeing, which make me optimistic because we think that the market for what we’ve been building, Comcast Business and Versa, is just getting started.
We’re still in the early innings of providing services like software-defined wide-area network and secure access services edge, which really captures the security side to really bring it to businesses, because that’s what they need to be able to run their business of the future. This hybrid workforce, the cloud migrations, securing and connecting not just people, but devices, being able to run the business and grow the business more efficiently, all of these are structural tailwinds that we’re experiencing today.
For a transcript of the full conversation, visit the San Francisco Business Times.
