Conviva℠The Pulse of Online Video

Darren Feher, president and chief executive officer, joined Conviva in October 2009 from NBC Universal, where he last served as executive vice president and chief technology officer.  Mr. Feher brings more than 15 years of organizational management, business operations and technical experience to lead Conviva in addressing the rapidly changing online video marketplace.

Mr. Feher spent nearly a decade at General Electric (GE) and NBC Universal and is regarded as the driving force behind the technical convergence of traditional television and digital media that helped position NBC Universal as a global leader.  He also is credited with the company’s advancements in online video, viral and social communities, interactive television, games, and mobile experiences. Additionally, he was instrumental in the fight against digital piracy with extensive technical and policy work resulting in the widespread adoption of video fingerprinting.

The foundation Mr. Feher built at NBC Universal paved the way for many groundbreaking digital firsts at the $17B media company including the multi-platform coverage of the Beijing Olympic games, the launch of hulu.com, live voting on network and cable television and the first delivery of content to mobile carriers and iTunes.  Among his many accolades, Mr. Feher was awarded three Emmys and one Webby for work in both television and the Internet.

While at GE, Mr. Feher held several technology leadership roles and was a Six Sigma Quality Leader focused on delivering defect-free technologies using statistical process control.  In 2009, he was awarded the Edison Award and joined a group recognized as the most impactful technologists at GE.

Mr. Feher also spent five years as an Army Signal Officer and is a graduate of West Point Military Academy.

As Conviva’s co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Zhang brings 20 years of pioneering research experience to the design and build of the company’s media control platform. As a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Dr. Zhang has established himself as one of the world’s leading authorities on Internet Quality of Service (QoS), video streaming, network control, and Internet architecture.

Dr. Zhang is credited with teaching and mentoring many computer network researchers who are now in industry (Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft) and academia (University of California, Berkeley, Rice, Purdue). In particular, he supervised Ion Stoica’s 2001 award-winning Ph.D. dissertation on Internet QoS. In addition, his End System Multicast (ESM) research group at CMU pioneered the overlay multicast architecture and developed the world’s first peer-to-peer live streaming system. Dr. Zhang was elected to be a Fellow of ACM in 2006 and received the Alfred Sloan Fellowship in 2000. He received the National Science Foundation Career Award in 1996 and held the Finmeccanica Chair in Computer Science at CMU from 1998 to 2001. Prior to co-founding Conviva, Dr. Zhang served as chief technology officer of Turin Networks from 2000 to 2003.

Dr. Zhang received a bachelor’s degree from Beijing University, a master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

An accomplished scientist and author, Dr. Ion Stoica is Conviva’s co-founder and chief technology officer.  He drives the technical advancement of the Conviva media and control platform. 

Before co-founding Conviva in 2006, Dr. Stoica spent over 15 years involved in networking research with an emphasis on Quality of Service (QoS) and traffic management on the Internet.  His research has led him to develop techniques and architectures that allow powerful and flexible network services to be deployed on the Internet, and more recently without compromising scalability.  Furthermore, he has designed algorithms and systems with strong theoretical foundations in the areas of peer-to-peer and cloud computing that can be deployed in the real world.

In 2001, Dr. Stoica and his Ph.D. thesis “Stateless Core: A Scalable Approach for Quality of Service in the Internet” received the ACM Best Dissertation Award, a highly coveted accolade that is only bestowed to one recipient a year. Dr. Stoica’s other achievements include the IEEE William R. Bennett Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, The Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE), the Okawa Foundation Fellowship, and the 2007 CoNEXT Rising Star Award. He has created and led several workshops, and subsequently published books including Quality of Service 2003 and Peer to Peer Systems in 2003. Dr. Stoica continues his research today and mentors scientists as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. Over the past 15 years, he has co-authored over 100 papers and technical reports.

He holds a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Bringing more than 15 years of sales management, business and market development experience, Keith Zubchevich is Conviva’s vice president of market development and operations, and is responsible for driving the company’s global sales efforts and securing key customers and strategic partnerships.

Mr. Zubchevich has a rich background of go-to-market strategy creation, along with building and growing sales organizations for both early-stage start ups as well as established industry leaders.  Prior to joining Conviva in 2008, he was vice president of business development at Riverbed Technology where he was instrumental in developing the industry leader’s go-to-market strategy and key partner relationships as the company went public.  Previously, Mr. Zubchevich worked for Cisco, where he was director of operations, responsible for storage-switching and optical solutions for both the sales and worldwide channels groups.  In those roles, he led the launch of Cisco’s MDS storage networking technology effort, which garnered revenues of $244M in two years.  Before working at Cisco, Mr. Zubchevich was a regional vice president with McDATA, where he was part of the core team that designed and implemented the company’s sales and channel coverage model.  Earlier in his career, Mr. Zubchevich was in sales management for the open systems divisions of Digital Equipment Corp. and StorageTek.

Mr. Zubchevich holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from San Diego State University.

With more than two decades of computer software and Internet industry experience, Dr. Hong Xia is Conviva’s vice president of engineering, responsible for driving innovation for the Conviva platform and development of its breakthrough products.

Prior to joining Conviva in 2008, Dr. Xia was vice president of technical services and product management at Limelight, where he was responsible for developing Internet content delivery solutions and successfully drove the adoption of Limelight’s media content delivery network (CDN) solutions beyond $100M in annual revenue.  Previously, he led the development of emerging datacenter services at Symantec, which included storage management services and enterprise security services for Fortune 500 customers. Before that, Dr. Xia held a number of senior positions and significantly contributed to Akamai’s early success. As vice president of product development at Akamai, Dr. Xia was responsible for driving its innovation efforts to expand content delivery into application delivery and other value-added capabilities.  Earlier in his career, Dr. Xia held senior engineering and research positions at Schlumberger, Thinking Machines and the German national center for supercomputing research.

Dr. Xia received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Zhejiang University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Technische Universität Berlin.

Chris Amen-Kroeger is Conviva’s vice president of systems engineering and operations. Mr. Amen-Kroeger manages the services engineering team to ensure the highest quality online video is delivered to Conviva’s diverse set of customers.

Building on more than a decade of systems and technology management experience in Internet-based services, his areas of responsibility include quality assurance, systems engineering, security operations, storage engineering and analysis. Mr. Amen-Kroeger has a strong entrepreneurial background including involvement with several successful startups and launching his own company, WeBot, a social media platform. Prior to joining Conviva in 2008, Mr. Amen-Kroeger managed the development and operations teams for Sony Pictures UGC video services. Previously, he worked for Salesforce.com where he was responsible for the company’s rapidly expanding infrastructure that experienced over 100 percent subscriber growth per year, and subsequently became the largest on-demand platform in the world. Earlier in his career, Mr. Amen-Kroeger built and managed one of the world’s largest content distribution networks for Time-Warner during his tenure at America Online.