DISCUSSION WAS RIFE TUESDAY NIGHT at Opening Reception about Comcast reorganization and departure of their video guru Kip Compton to a position at Cisco.
Big loss for Comcast. The re-org direction is much like the recent Rogers Communications re-org in that its focused on bring voice, data, video and emerging wireless into one converged operation.
Also it seems the corporation’s direction for 2006 is to be more inward-focused in improving operations and hence margins etc. rather than acquisitions. Also, the engineers have been given aggressive targets for VOIP rollout during 2006 and it appears that will be Comcast’s main theme for growth this year.
David Juliano is heading up Comcast’s marketing and product development, John Schanz the overall operations engineering and offloading most operations engineering tasks previously Dave Fellows responsibility hence enabling Fellows to take a more traditional CTO role and lead the new technology and engineering efforts and any consequential R&D.
Steve Silvers has also been off loaded of his JV activities so he can concentrate on set-top boxes and other CPE and device initiatives. Lots of change readies Comcast for the quadruple play and puts it in a much more focused and stronger competitive position.
Nick Hamilton-Piercy is the former CTO at Rogers Communications and now works as a company advisor. He is in Tampa covering the SCTE Emerging Technologies conference for www.cartt.ca
