OREANDA-NEWS. ABBYY®, a leading global provider of document recognition, data capture, and linguistic technologies and services, today named Peter Meechan as chief operating officer for ABBYY USA. The appointment signals a focus on scaling ABBYY's worldwide growth while strategically advancing its market position in knowledge extraction, through state-of-the-art enterprise search of big data, in a multi-device environment.

“Peter brings an extensive background in global corporate management for organizations ranging from multi-billion corporations to start-ups into his new role as COO,” said Sergey Andreyev, CEO of ABBYY Headquarters in Moscow. “We believe he will be a great addition to our executive team because of his experience scaling organizations in the enterprise software, mobile, IP and consumer electronics industries during periods of rapid growth.”

Passionately focused on exceptional user experiences and innovation, Peter has notable contributions to the deployment of Flash® on more than one billion devices, pioneering software applications including Academy Award® winning computer graphics products, and to the Digital Home. At multi-billion dollar corporations (Macromedia/Adobe, Intellectual Ventures, Sony) Peter's roles included senior vice president, vice president, and general manager. In the start-up environment, roles included CEO, president, senior vice president, and director (Catalyst Mobile, Gracenote/Sony, Wavefront Technologies/Silicon Graphics). Prior to ABBYY, Peter was a venture advisor for Sofinnova Ventures, a USD 1.4 billion venture capital firm founded in 1974. Peter has served on various boards for organizations in the U.S., Japan, and China and currently sits on the board of Children's Hospital & Research Center Foundation. He attended Waseda University in Tokyo and is a graduate of the University of Oregon.

“I am honored to join the ABBYY executive team,” said Meechan.” I look forward to working with the ABBYY organization of over 1,200 people, including the more than 300 industry leading engineers in the field of natural language understanding, to advance our market position, ensure operational excellence and make our customers and partners successful.”