Cyanogen has been quite busy in emerging markets lately, partnering with Smartfren in Indonesia is just one example. Emerging markets is important to any startup as it allows them to gain some market share pretty quickly, as long as the make the correct moves. With these two new executives the company is bringing in, they are hoping to have made some great decisions here. These two new hires are going to allow the company to continue to expand in India, China and Europe, all of which are big markets, maybe not so much Europe compared to China and India though.
In today’s announcement, Cyanogen announced that they are bringing on Karthick Iyer, who used to work for Qualcomm, as the VP of Global Systems. And Stephen Lawler from Amazon engineering, as the Senior VP of Engineering. The company stated that Lawler will be overseeing the worldwide engineering for Cyanogen, with Iyer leading systems engineering. Two very key hires for a booming startup like Cyanogen.
Lawler has spent around 20 years in the mobile industry, and is leaving Amazon for Cyanogen. He served as Vice President of Traffic over at Amazon. Prior to Amazon, he spent 15 years over at Microsoft in key senior roles including being the Chief Technical Officer of Bing Maps and the General Manager of Software Development for Bing Maps, Bing Mobile, Local Search, MSN and Virtual Earth. On the flip side, Iyer has held many responsibilities at Qualcomm over the past 18 years with his most recent position being the Vice President of Engineering. In that position, Iyer led a global team that would work on Android solutions at the chipset level, that included developing, designing and commercializing the software. It’s fair to say that Iyer had a pretty big hand in helping Google to ship 1 billion Android devices globally. Now it’s onto the next billion, as Google’s Sundar Pichai would say.
Currently, Cyanogen has offices in Lisbon, Seattle and Palo Alto, and have plans to open up more in India, China and Europe in the near future. Both Karthick Iyer and Stephen Lawler will likely play a major role in those new offices that Cyanogen plans to open up. You can check out the full press release in the source links down below for more information.