NEW YORK—NBCUniversal has launched the NBCUniversal Technology Center, a technology center 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. NBCUniversal invested approximately $17 million in building the 63,000-square-foot facility 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 collaboration technologies to assist in cocreation among the company’s offices around the globe. It has a “Technology Show Lab,” equipped with the latest mobile, virtualization, big data platforms and emerging technologies such as Comcast’s “xfinity” platform, which gives employees, start-ups, and industry technology partners an 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 of Operations and Technical Services at 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.”
Sanjay Macwan Sanjay Macwan, former chief technology officer of AT&T, will head up the office as senior vice president and chief technology of Media Labs. In this role, Macwan will lead Media Labs, a newly formed organization within NBCUniversal that will work 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 from the worlds of application strategy, mobile development, virtualization, video, and consumer-experience technologies, according to the company. Macwan will be based at the NBCUniversal Technology Center, and will report to Andrew Jordan, senior vice president of International Operations & Technology for NBCUniversal.
“Sanjay brings to this new role an entrepreneurial approach to the business, and a proven track record of successfully spotting and harnessing emerging trends in technology in a wide range of areas,” Wallace said. “That combination makes him a perfect fit for Media Labs, which will serve as an in-house incubator for new technology concepts relating to our core businesses. I look forward to working closely with him as we partner with the company’s various divisions to both anticipate technology-driven disruptions to the business, and identify technologies that can help drive business growth.”
During his career with AT&T, Macwan held a number of technology and innovation roles spanning areas of 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. He holds 14 patents, and has an additional 25 patent applications in process.
