Big Blog

Just under a fortnight ago, Josh Silverman blogged about Skype’s plans for the coming months. We’ve been making some changes to the way we work, restructuring and expanding our teams to help them work more effectively, and part of that process involves hiring new people at all levels. You can check out our jobs site for a list of vacancies – there are 55 at the time of writing.

Today, however, we’re very pleased to have filled two vacancies with fantastic new additions to our senior staff. Very shortly, Daniel Berg will hop on board as Chief Technology Officer and Christopher S. Dean starts straight away as Chief Strategy Officer. Both of them will report directly to Josh.

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Daniel Berg

Daniel Berg’s primary responsibility will be to drive innovation and ensure Skype continues to develop great software. With a mandate covering Skype’s full range of products, he will develop and maintain a global team of more than 300 staff.

Daniel joins Skype after 15 years at Sun Microsystems, most recently as CTO for their Global Sales and Services Division and Vice President of Systems Engineering for Sun’s Emerging Markets Region. He joins the team on the 1st January 2009. There’s some more about Dan on his Sun blog.

Christopher S. Dean

Christopher S. Dean will focus on Skype’s strategy, including the development of partnerships and strategic alliances with other like-minded organisations and the acquisition of companies and technologies for Skype. His team will act as the incubator and strategic planning hub for new ideas and projects which support Skype’s technology vision and long term corporate goals.

Christopher brings to Skype over 20 years of experience in the technology industry, and has previously specialised in strategy consulting and corporate and business development. Most recently he was co-founder of Texada Capital. Christopher starts at Skype this week.

You can find full biographies for Daniel and Christopher in the accompanying press release. Another recent joiner at executive level is our head of HR, Anne Gillespie. Prior to joining Skype a month ago, Anne spent much of her career with major technology corporations, including Compaq and HP.