Chief Technology Officer to Take the Helm at World’s Leading P2P Technology Provider
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BitTorrent, the global standard technology for the delivery of rich media on the Internet, today announced the appointment of Eric Klinker as the company’s new chief executive officer (CEO). As a well-respected and recognized technologist, Klinker brings more than two decades of networking, content delivery, and management experience to BitTorrent. Klinker was also appointed to BitTorrent’s Board of Directors.
“BitTorrent has revolutionized the way publishers and users distribute and consume rich media on the Internet and has an active user community with an install base north of 170 million clients around the world,” said Eric Klinker, CEO of BitTorrent, Inc. “In my new role, I look forward to working with our management team to further propel BitTorrent’s technology adoption, capitalize on the company’s growth opportunities, and drive value for our robust ecosystem of partners, which includes consumers, content owners, hardware makers, software developers and network operators.”
Klinker has served as the company’s chief technology officer (CTO) since Q2 2007 and has been instrumental to the continued development of the BitTorrent client, BitTorrent’s Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA) content delivery service, BitTorrent’s Software Development Kit (SDK) and BitTorrent’s proprietary advanced congestion control technology. The latter has been at the center of BitTorrent’s influential discussions and well-publicized collaboration with Comcast Corporation as it seeks to deploy a protocol-agnostic network management solution. BitTorrent is active inside the global standards body for the Internet, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), to standardize this technology and allow other peer-to-peer (P2P) providers to leverage its profound benefits to both consumers and network partners.
“Eric is the right leader for BitTorrent,” said Ping Li, partner at Accel Partners and BitTorrent board member. “Eric possesses the right combination of technology expertise and management experience. As a known innovator, he has what it takes to maintain, if not enhance, BitTorrent’s status as the world’s leading P2P technology provider and to drive even greater value for its global community of users, including end consumers, software developers, content publishers, hardware manufacturers, and Internet Service Providers (ISPs).”
David Chao, BitTorrent board member and co-founder at DCM, said, “Eric has a proven track record and has demonstrated clear leadership at the company since he joined, helping to lead BitTorrent’s world-class engineering team and provide strategic vision for the company.”
Prior to joining BitTorrent in 2007, Klinker served as CTO and vice president of engineering at Internap, a leading provider of network optimization and content delivery solutions. During his tenure at Internap, Klinker led a world-class information technology (IT) and engineering team, and oversaw the expansion of Internap’s core products that resulted in increased revenues and rapid growth in shareholder value. Previously, Klinker worked at netVmg, Excite@Home and the Naval Research Laboratory. Klinker holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
About BitTorrent
BitTorrent is the global standard for delivering high-quality files over the Internet. Millions of users worldwide are using BitTorrent’s leading peer-accelerated content delivery platform to publish, discover and download digital entertainment content quickly, easily and securely. Founded in 2004, BitTorrent is a privately held company backed by venture capital firms, Accel and DCM. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit www.bittorrent.com.
BitTorrent is a trademark of BitTorrent, Inc.