Rovi Hires Head Of New Discovery Unit

Rovi Corp. has hired former Hewlett-Packard exec Omar Javaid to the post of senior vice president of Discovery, a new business group at the programing guide specialist that will be based out of the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif.

Javaid will head up Rovi’s discovery product offerings and oversee multiple areas across the group – from engineering, architecture and user experience to product lifecycle management, program management and product marketing. He reports directly to John Burke, Rovi’s recently named executive vice president and chief operating officer, who previously was with Arris and Motorola Mobility.

Among recent moves in the video disovery sphere, Rovi acquired voice search startup Veveo earlier this year for $62 million.

Javaid most served as vice president and general manager, Commercial Mobility, at HP, where he led mobile computing efforts focusing on enterprise software and services. Before that, he was the vice president of product management at Motorola Mobility where he managed and launched hardware and also led Motorola’s software, cloud services and media strategy initiatives. He is also late of BBO Global, and Qualcomm.

“With extensive experience in managing large scale, cloud infrastructure initiatives, Omar will bring industry best practices and proven approaches to help expedite our transition to Internet Protocol-based solutions for multiscreen guidance and discovery,” Burke said, in a statement. “The diverse skill set and expertise that he brings to this new role will help us streamline our efforts across multiple company functions, foster collaboration and centralize our product initiatives in entertainment discovery as we bring new innovations to life.”