NBCU Creates Tech Center And Media Labs

NBCUniversal today announced the launch of the NBCUniversal Technology Center, a state-of-the-art facility located in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., which will be the new center for the company’s core technology team, as well as the home of the new Media Labs operation.

The creation of the 63,000 square foot Technology Center represents an investment of approximately $17 million in the company’s New Jersey operations, and serves as a complement to NBCUniversal’s previously announced investments in the infrastructure of its New York operations.

The NBCUniversal Technology Center features an open design with state-of-the-art collaboration technologies to facilitate and accelerate co-creation amongst the company’s offices around the globe; a “Technology Show Lab” equipped with the mobile, virtualization, big data platforms and industry-leading emerging technologies such as Comcast’s “xfinity” platform which, NBCU says, “gives employees, start-ups, and industry technology partners a rich environment to experiment with the latest technologies and business models in the content ecosystem.”

“The NBCUniversal Technology Center is the perfect home for our technology team,” said John Wallace, president, operations and technical services, NBCUniversal. “It’s been designed to foster real creativity and collaboration, and we think it will quickly become a key center for innovation at NBCUniversal.”

As part of the announcement the company also named Sanjay Macwan senior vice president and chief technology officer, Media Labs. In this role he will lead Media Labs, a newly formed organization within NBCUniversal that will be dedicated to working with academic research groups, start-up companies, and the global venture capital community to accelerate technology innovations and to help develop new business models for the company’s content delivery businesses.

Media Labs will be staffed with technology professionals in application strategy, mobile development, virtualization, video and consumer-experience technologies. Macwan will be based at the NBCUniversal Technology Center, and will report to Andrew Jordan, SVP, international operations and technology, NBCUniversal.

Macwan joins NBCUniversal from AT&T, where he was VP, AT&T chief technology office and headed the CTO Technology Council, which incubated highly successful programs such as AT&T Foundry, a series of innovation centers that collaborate with global technology start-ups and the VC community; The Innovation Pipeline (TIP), an industry leading innovation platform; and the team that was responsible for strategic analysis of key ecosystems of web, ad/search, communications, social networks, and content.

During his career with AT&T, Macwan held a number of technology and innovation roles spanning mobility, cloud, multimedia, Internet architecture and large-scale application development. Most recently he led a team of 400 engineers and technologists focused on mobility, cloud, enterprise, emerging services, and security.

Macwan is on a technology advisory council of KPCB, a top global VC firm based in Silicon Valley, and on an industry advisory board with Ericsson. He has also served on the advisory boards of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO), and successful startups such as Arcturus and Mu Dynamics (acquired by Spirent).

He holds 14 patents, and has an additional 25 patent applications in process.

Macwan holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering, and an M.S. in computer science from Polytechnic University in New York. He is also a graduate of the ASIS/Security Executive Development Program from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and has earned an MBA PowerPak from Northeastern University.