PictureTel Names Robert Byrnes Vice President and General Manager of Emerging Business - Company Operations

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Dec 13, 1999

PictureTel Corporation, the world leader in integrated electronic collaboration, Wednesday announced the appointment of Robert Byrnes to the new position of vice president and general manager of emerging business. He reports to Dr. Norman E. Gaut, PictureTel's chairman and CEO.

Byrnes is responsible for creating new businesses by leveraging PictureTel's world-class streaming-video and interactive video, audio and data building-block architectures and technologies. The emerging business initiatives also include licensing individual PictureTel technologies - such as its audio codecs - to third parties and partnering with major Internet-infrastructure companies to create a network of new Internet-centric operating companies to provide media-application products and services to businesses and consumers.

Byrnes joins PictureTel from A.T. Cross Company, where he was head of the Pen Computing Division. He also spent several years with NEC Technologies, where he was senior vice president for North America, and later executive vice president, where his responsibilities included sales, services, U.S. manufacturing, distribution and logistics. Byrnes also spent many years with IBM in a variety of sales, marketing and strategic partnership development positions.

"PictureTel is undergoing a significant transformation, one that will enable us and our partners to bring exciting new products and applications to customers around the world," said Dr. Gaut. "One of the keys to our future success, will be our ability to leverage our industry-leading videoconferencing products and services with a new generation of capabilities that will make integrated electronic collaboration tools a vital part of communications over any network. Bob Byrnes, with his years of technical and business experience at several industry leaders, will play a prominent role in the evolution of PictureTel. His mission is to develop our unique network-collaboration components, including our patented audio technologies, so that we can drive strongly into these new markets."

PictureTel Corporation (www.picturetel.com) is the world leader in integrated collaboration tools for video-, audio- and data-conferencing.