The Team

Dr. Nikil Jayant, Co-Founder and CEO

Nikil obtained his BE and PhD degrees in Electrical Communication Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science. During 1968-98, Nikil Jayant performed and led fundamental signal processing and communications research at Bell Laboratories. At Bell Labs, he created and led the Signal Processing Research Department and the Advanced Audio Technology Department, and later served as the Founding Director of the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory. Dr. Jayant joined Georgia Tech in 1998 as Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. In an earlier entrepreneurial effort at Georgia Tech, he served as co-founder and chief scientist of EGT (acquired by Arris in 2009), and helped raise $20M+ in VC-funding. Dr. Jayant is the author of 5 books, 150 papers and 40 patents in audiovisual signal processing and broadband communications. Dr. Jayant is a winner of several IEEE Awards including the Third Millennium Medal and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Jack Bryant, EVP Business Development and Sales

Jack Bryant has over thirty years of executive level experience in the telecommunications and video industries, spanning general management, sales and sales management, marketing and product management, and strategy planning. He has held various Board level, CEO, Division President and VP level positions at Wave7 Optics, Concurrent Computer Corporation, ANTEC/Arris, General Instrument, Scientific-Atlanta and other public and private companies. Jack was most recently VP of Worldwide Sales at venture capital backed Wave7 Optics where he successfully directed the sales and market development efforts of the company’s Fiber-to-the-premise (FTTx) product offering, which led to the sale of the company to Enablence Networks. Earlier, Jack was CEO at Emmy Award winning Concurrent (NASDAQ:CCUR) where he built the management team to win a market leading position in the cable television video-on-demand market; and as President of the Digital Systems group at ANTEC, Jack led the development and marketing for Arris’s Cornerstone product which has been deployed worldwide to millions of end of users.

Pravin Mane, Co-Founder and VP-Product Development

Pravin has over twelve years of product development experience in corporate environments. Pravin obtained his BE from Pune University, India and MSCS from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). At VQLink, Pravin leads the development and management of the core product and its related architecture and technologies as well as various operational aspects (such as customer support, finance, payroll, and strategy) of the organization. Before starting VQLink, Pravin worked at Intel Corporation, ClickFox Inc., Infinovate Inc. and Rational Software. While at Intel, Pravin worked on Server load balancers as well as multi-billion dollar platform initiatives such as Intel Centrino and Intel ViiV technologies where he invented and developed advanced multimedia streaming technologies for Intel’s Digital Home platforms. While working at Infinovate, Pravin worked as a consultant for IP digital set-top box vendor Nagravision. Pravin has multiple issued and pending patents in the areas of video processing and communication  as well as wireless communication technologies.

Advisors

Chris Bowick, Strategy Advisor

Chris Bowick is a widely recognized industry leader in broadband technologies and services. In June 2009, he retired from his position as Senior Vice President of Engineering & Chief Technical Officer for Cox Communications. At Cox, he was responsible for strategic technology planning, day-to-day technical operations, and the development and deployment of technology solutions for the company’s video, voice, high speed data and wireless products, including the development and deployment of many telecommunications services:  circuit-switched telephony, Voice over IP, high-speed data, digital video, HDTV, video-on-demand, and interactive television. He was also responsible for Network Engineering and Network Operations for Cox’s nation-wide network infrastructure including its national backbone, Metropolitan Area Networks and HFC networks. Before his career at Cox, Mr. Bowick held leadership positions at Jones Intercable and Scientific Atlanta. In 2007, Chris Bowick received the highest honor of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, the Vanguard Award for Science and Technology.