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Virgil Bistriceanu, President and CEO.

Virgil head shot

Most recently Virgil was Centro's Chief Technology Officer (CTO), between April 2006 and March 2009, after six years as CTO of MyPoints.com, followed by more than 4 years in senior technology leadership positions at United Airlines and its subsidiaries. He was a co-founder and CTO of of MotivationNet, which later merged with Intellipost to form MyPoints.com, a company that went public successfully in 1999.

Throughout his career, Virgil built, managed, and motivated teams of smart, independent, innovative and eager-to-learn, loyal professionals who have a true sense of ownership of the products they create and support.

Virgil is a true believer in agile software development and a big supporter of the FOSS movement. In his most recent full-time job, with Centro, the media planning application at the core of Centro's business was developed from scratch using Ruby On Rails, with a PostgreSQL database on the back-end, running on commodity hardware powered by Linux. Business continuity was provided by means of a secondary data center, continuous database replication and manual fail-over, among other things.

Business Intelligence at Centro, also built from scratch, was powered by Pentaho.

While at Centro, Virgil's Software Development team delivered production software every other week; his team practiced test-driven development religiously as well as pair programming as a matter of standard development practice. Back in March 2009, the ratio between unit-test code and functional code was 1.4/1.

Virgil's team at MyPoints.com consisted of up to 75 professionals within the Development, Databases, Operations, Quality Assurance and Network Operations Center departments. He managed a yearly technology budget of up to $25 million. Virgil's team successfully deployed three major releases of the MyPoints.com application and web site, together with three international implementations (Sweden, UK, and Japan).

At United Airlines Virgil managed, among other things, software development for united.com and software development and QA for United's next generation Internet Booking Engine; when you book a flight today on united.com, that's using the product Virgil was in charge with for most of the life cycle.

While at United, Virgil worked closely with various business units to define, implement, and successfully run a release-based software delivery process that optimally used shared available resources, ensured predictability in application delivery and addressed business needs based on clear financial and strategic objectives. Virgil set standards and implemented processes to improve the overall quality of applications delivered such as automated unit-testing, test-driven development, mandatory functional, load and stress testing, etc.

Since 1993, Virgil has been an Instructor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he has been teaching undergraduate and graduate classes for the Computer Science and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Departments, ranging from 500 level Computer Architecture courses for graduate students, to 400 and 300 level Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, Information Security, Logic Design and Implementation and Discrete Mathematics courses for undergraduate students.

Virgil holds his MS in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania. He has conducted research in performance analysis for parallel programming languages, with emphasis on Message Driven Computation as part of his Ph.D. study in Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology.