Title: Senior vice president of strategy and development for Cox Communications.
Background: Before joining Cox in 1990, Mr. Clement was a financial analyst for Merrill Lynch. He assumed his current position at Cox in August 2000.
Compare and contrast: “Last year it was hard to get people because they were being wooed by dot-coms. And because the dot-coms were so prevalent and new stuff was everywhere, it was probably easier to get internal approvals to go off and do a variety of trials because there wasn’t as much a focus on return on investment then as there is now. But also last year there was the unreasonable expectation the market had that a cable company can move as quickly in offering these applications as an Internet company. And I think there was disappointment.
“Fast-forward to today-there’s greater access to people. Our platform is wonderfully flexible, and there’s no shortage of opportunities to find applications and find folks who want to partner with us. So the challenge is prioritization.”
Future: “On the video side, you’re going to see Cox more fully embrace video on demand. And once the video-on-demand infrastructure is in place, that really opens the door to a whole host of interesting applications that the cable operator is uniquely positioned to offer. On the data side, we’ve seen DSL stumble a bit. We are not by any means confident that we’ve won the war. We may have won recent skirmishes, but we still have to deliver and execute on the core offering in terms of service and in terms of driving penetration. The nice thing on the data side is that we’ve got a number of folks hoping to work with us in partnership to co-promote and co-sell various applications that ride the data pipe-a number of interesting things that I think will really drive penetration and get people interested.”