Viasat Adds Three Executive Hires

Carlsbad, Calif., March 5, 2020--Viasat today announced the expansion of its global leadership team with the addition of Jim Dodd, as president, Global Mobile Solutions; Peter Langkilde, as vice president and Head of Broadband Services for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA); and Dr. Krishna Nathan, as chief information officer (CIO).

"Viasat's growth and expansion into a more global company requires the ongoing addition of highly talented people to the team. The addition of Jim, Peter and Krishna represent a big step in that evolution. These are three highly-respected leaders in their fields. They are passionate visionaries with decades of experience successfully leading global organizations and programs," said Rick Baldridge, president and chief operating officer at Viasat. "We're confident Jim, Peter and Krishna will complement Viasat's current management team. They are all great collaborators and will be instrumental in driving global initiatives around the ViaSat-3 constellation launch and our next phase of accelerated services growth."

Baldridge continued, "Jim will play a critical role in expanding opportunities and our customer base in domestic and international mobility markets, Peter will be responsible for growing our broadband services business throughout EMEA and Krishna will lead our platform, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) deployment efforts across engineering, business and corporate segments."

With more than 30-years of aviation experience, Jim Dodd joins Viasat as president, Global Mobile Solutions. In this role, Jim will broaden Viasat's mobility opportunities, strategically aligning current and future satellite capabilities with global mobility sector needs. Areas of focus under the global mobility umbrella include: business aviation, commercial aviation, connected cars, maritime and railway transportation, to name a few.

Prior to Viasat, Jim held a number of senior-level aviation management and engineering roles at The Boeing Company. He focused on complex Department of Defense/international contracted programs, overseeing strategic planning, execution, engineering and business development.

Jim holds a BS in Physics from Arkansas State University and an MBA in Finance from Seattle University.

With 30-years of global mobile sector depth, Peter Langkilde joins Viasat as vice president and Head of Broadband Services, EMEA. In this role, he will oversee Viasat's broadband services growth with respect to leading residential, business and community internet opportunities across EMEA—setting the stage for the launch of ViaSat-3 services in the upcoming years.

Prior to Viasat, Peter co-founded Virgin Mobile Middle-East & Africa, Virgin Mobile Latin America as well as Virgin Mobile Central & Eastern Europe. He was co-founder and CEO of Afrimax Vodafone, the African mobile network operator; co-founder and president of Reliance WiMAX World, a joint venture with Reliance of India; and founder of End2End, a global mobile data infrastructure provider, which served many of the largest mobile providers in the world. In addition, Peter held a number of senior leadership, executive and operations roles across leading companies such as BellSouth, TDC, Millicom and Leap Wireless International.

Peter is chairman of Virgin Mobile Middle-East & Africa and serves on the board of directors for Virgin Mobile Latin America. He holds a M.Sc. in International Business Strategy from Aalborg University.

With more than 25-years of next-generation IT expertise, Dr. Krishna Nathan joins Viasat as CIO. In this role, he will lead the Company's digital transformation and platform initiatives, using analytics, customer-experience-centric processes, data-driven decision-making, automation and AI to enable the Company to quickly scale globally while responding to changing market dynamics.

Prior to Viasat, Krishna was the CIO of S&P Global, where he led a change management effort to embrace new business models based on emerging technologies like blockchain and AI. He also drove the migration to a cloud-based model. Prior to this role, he held various senior leadership and engineering positions at IBM, leading research and product efforts in AI and machine learning, storage and next-generation cloud data center architectures.

Krishna holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. in Engineering from Brown University.