RampRate Team

General Manager – Consulting

New York, New York, United States

As General Manager, Steve leads client engagements that include sourcing of datacenters, infrastructure management, connectivity, and content delivery (CDN). Additionally, Steve runs benchmarking and operations analysis projects to help clients assess their current levels of spend, service, and efficiency. He is also a noted speaker on internet infrastructure and media technology, and has advised hundreds of financial firms with analysis of technology markets.

Steve has worked on large-scale datacenter, content networking, storage, and delivery architecture since 1997. Steve was Vice President of Operations at Speedera Networks, overseeing 80 datacenters with thousands of servers, procurement, service levels, and customer-service operations. Speedera’s CDN offered web caching, whole-site delivery, global load balancing, software downloads, global DNS service and streaming. Steve was the architect of Speedera’s streaming service which delivered for brands such as Fox “American Idol”, Sony Music, and CBS. Speedera was purchased by Akamai Technologies Inc. in 2005.

Before Speedera, Steve built one of the world’s first internationally distributed streaming CDNs at TEN-TV, a business broadcaster acquired by Nokia. At TEN-TV, Steve authored an early CDN patent describing a load-balanced global CDN with satellite-fed encoding systems.

Steve first began working on streaming technology at VDOnet, a key inventor of early variable-bitrate streaming codecs and servers. VDOnet’s technology was used in Microsoft’s initial streaming players. Steve’s digital media experience began at Sonic Solutions, a Lucasfilm spinoff and Emmy award winner for its pioneering work in audio technology. While at Sonic, he was the lead sales engineer for the first generation of high-bandwidth network-based audio- and video-editing systems. Steve’s media business career began with such high profile work as Sound Systems Engineer on the English Patient (Oscar winner for Best Sound), and as Road Manager for Grammy winning musician George Winston.

Steve has an MBA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he also completed the Electronic Sound Engineering program.