NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Highwinds® today announced the promotion of Rich Day to president. Since joining Highwinds in 2010 as chief architect, Day has been at the center of the company's technological innovation and new product development as well as the significant global growth of Highwinds CDN (content delivery network).
"Rich has a brilliant technological mind, but if you look at his career before joining us in 2010, and all that he's accomplished here in the past five years, you'll see that he was as much chief customer advocate as he was chief architect. We share the belief that technology and service should never be mutually exclusive – and that's why this new role suits him," said Steve Miller, founder and CEO of Highwinds. "Rich will now serve at the helm of all technical and customer-facing teams, who together are tasked with continuing to operate one of the largest edge compute and caching networks in the world, the highest-performing CDN, and the industry's best customer service."
Day has long been recognized as an innovator and luminary in the content delivery space. In 1999, he co-founded Speedera Networks and served as its chief architect until its acquisition by Akamai in 2005. Following the acquisition, he stayed on at Akamai for several years to oversee customer transitions. Day is credited with some of the industry's earliest CDN advances and is named as an inventor on 48 CDN-related patents.
As Highwinds' chief architect, Day led the technical teams that engineered the global network to scale rapidly and handle explosive growth. His teams have optimized CDN performance, added new PoPs (points of presence) and further boosted network capacity to maintain substantial headroom. Over the past seven quarters, Highwinds increased network capacity by 300 percent. The company is in the process of doubling capacity once again, to be completed by April 2016. In addition to capacity augmentation, Highwinds' engineering and operations teams have successfully deployed a global fleet refresh of the network's fifth-generation hardware architecture, including the latest in solid state drive technology, enhanced global security features, and an expanded selection of premium network peers around the world.
Day has also been instrumental in the development and advancement of Highwinds' product suite. In the last two years alone, he has led the teams that created StrikeTracker® 3.0, the latest release of Highwinds' award-winning CDN management portal, as well as the new EveryStream™ media tool chain and Highwinds Cloud Storage™ platform.
"I'm honored to be given this opportunity to lead our talented teams with direction, focus and passion, but our ongoing success is not about me. It's the result of an experienced management team working together toward common goals. It's also the result of our people taking products that are already great and making them even better, inventing new solutions that provide immense value to customers, and continually raising the bar on customer service," said Rich Day, president of Highwinds.
Steve Miller, Rich Day and other Highwinds executives will be available for meetings in New York during the New York Media Festival, which runs Oct. 6-9, and O'Reilly Velocity, which runs Oct. 12-14. To request a meeting, please visit www.highwinds.com/en/company/events.
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