The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers has added three cable operators -- Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications and Cox Communications -- to its recently announced Corporate Alliance Program.
The SCTE announced the program in April, with Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Suddenlink Communications on board as charter members, offering new training and education and programs and elements aimed at expanding the SCTE’s base of individual members.
SCTE said Alpha Technologies and Arris Group are also on board as “beta vendor partners,” and will help the organization develop a full vendor program that’s expected to launch sometime in 2015.
The program is designed to help the Society form a stronger bond with its operator and vendor partners with new technology training tools and education programs, including seats at the SCTE Leadership Institute programs at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. The program also offers discounts for individual memberships. A one-year SCTE membership typically runs $68.
In April, SCTE said it had just under 17,000 members, and now has approximately 18,000.
Execs from the three new Corporate Alliance members extolled the virtues of the program:
"Specialized, top-quality training helps advance the career growth of our technical teams, drive adoption of new technical skills and deliver better customer experiences," said Pragash Pillai, senior vice president of network management and operations for Cablevision, in a statement. "These benefits make our membership in the Corporate Alliance Program so important. We are proud that our engineering and operations teams are able to leverage the advantages of SCTE training, which includes access to a vast library of resources and training materials that have been created with direct input from the operator community."
"While Corporate Alliance offers a variety of benefits, there are two that are of greatest value to Charter," added Wayne Davis, vice president, technical operations for Charter. "The immediate ability to bring SCTE training and educational resources to our engineering team as a whole, as well as the ability to identify candidates for the SCTE-Georgia Tech and SCTE Tuck leadership programs that will help us develop our next generation of management professionals."
“Aligning training with deployment is key to accelerated rollouts of new cable services,” said Marci Saaijenga, vice president of technology quality and control for Cox. "The Corporate Alliance Program’s unified learning environment creates a setting in which member organizations like ours can have continued access to the best new thinking and training processes from throughout the industry."
