It takes much more than shiny new code and ambition to get Comcast Business's attention as a potential partner for bringing new tech to the wider market.

Bob Victor, chief product and customer solutions officer at Comcast Business, spoke recently with InformationWeek about the vetting and development approach his company takes to working with external innovators.

As a subsidiary of media giant Comcast, Comcast Business focuses its services — phone, internet and cable — on business customers. In April, the company announced the Comcast Business Innovation Lab would work with Dell Technologies, Expedient and Digital Realty to develop new enterprise technologies.

This is the second installment in Outside In, InformationWeek's series that explores how large enterprises scout, cultivate and scale innovation from external technology partners and startups.

The first story examined how Experian collaborated with agentic AI startup Skyfire and other partners to develop its Agent Trust Framework, a system designed to help verify AI-agent transactions and establish trust in autonomous systems. 

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How Comcast uses outside innovation 

Large enterprises creating the space or a formal program to explore new tech from outside sources is fairly common. Part of what makes Comcast Business different, Victor said, is that it works with "a ton" of innovation at scale.

"We launch mass market products like cybersecurity products or SASE, SD-WAN … that are third-party products, out in the market," he said.

Comcast Business also explores internal innovations, including potential developments with agentic AI that Victor could not share much about at this time. However, external partners may help deliver new tech at opportunistic moments. "How do we hit the right time at scale?" Victor said.

Innovation development at Comcast Business has contributed to its overall growth, and the new lab is meant to further such gains through new approaches. 

"When I joined Comcast in 2008, Comcast Business was like $200 million a year. We're over $11 billion now," Victor said, referring to annual revenue for Comcast Business.

He said the lab wants to see applications and innovations that have evidence of market demand, but the technology needs assistance to scale — which is where Comcast Business comes in. 

There typically is still work to be done before the product is ready for broader customer use. "The offering really has to be tailored," Victor said.

What Comcast looks for in partners

Comcast Business seeks technology partners that have a foothold in the market and are looking to expand their reach.

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"Oftentimes, they'll be offering these technologies direct to clients, but they want to try to scale them and offer them more broadly across the U.S. or across the world," Victor said.

Comcast Business also looks for customers interested in trying the innovation as early adopters and providing real-world use cases before scaling up.

The types of technology Comcast Business looks for relate to its focus on the intersection of networking and compute, Victor said. 

"We think of ourselves as a managed service provider, and so we don't want to operate data centers," he said. However, Victor said Comcast Business remains aware that AI and the cloud raise questions about bringing data to compute or vice versa.

Comcast Business has a history of exploring innovation with small customers before expanding across its customer base. Victor said the innovation lab instead starts with very large customers who can invest in the technology and support some customization. From there, Comcast Business may bring the new technology to the midmarket. 

The strategy is to move quickly to deliver the innovation while it is still relevant and can be reasonably leveraged. 

"If the time frame is longer than a year, it's not that interesting," Victor said. He explained that Comcast Business will try the tech for that year, then decide whether to standardize and commercialize the innovation or go another route.

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"Once we identify an opportunity, we want to be up in market, up and running with a customer and with a partner in less than a quarter," he said.

Not looking for moonshots

To deliver at that pace, Comcast Business looks to innovations that are more mature than very early ideas drafted on napkins or have not yet proven they have traction. 

"It's definitely not meant to be a moonshot, where we just kind of invest, not sure if there's a market or not," he said. The idea is to develop from that established market, then introduce a different element to the innovation, he said. 

The Expedient partnership 

In other words, Comcast Business is looking to build on technologies that already have market validation rather than create entirely new markets from scratch. The partnership with Expedient offers one example. 

"If you think about our deal with Expedient … They're up and running. They help midmarket customers and larger customers with enterprise managed services. But that's not something, typically, that a telco or a large enterprise communication firm does," Victor said.

The intent in that arrangement is to see if customers gravitate toward the combination of connectivity from Comcast Business supporting Expedient's offerings. "We have thousands of customers, tens of thousands of customers who need the service, but don't typically look to a network provider to provide that," he said.

Getting a project started can begin with a partner reaching out to Comcast Business about a tech offering they believe has legs but has not yet scaled, and that they do not have the go-to-market momentum on their own, Victor said. 

"We have to have a vendor partner with a real technology solution that we can scale, that doesn't need to be invented or developed. And secondly, we need at least one customer, ideally a couple of customers that are interested in the application that we engage on and want to commercialize it with us," he said.

Before potential partners rush to push their ideas at Comcast Business, Victor offered this advice. 

"It's got to be designed to scale. It's so easy to build things these days with code; anyone can build a great demo. The question is, does it have observability? Is it secure? What happens when, instead of having a couple customers, you have thousands of customers?" he asked.

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