Vernon Irvin

Vernon L Irvin (born near Pittsburgh) currently works as President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Virtual World Computing (VWC). Prior to VWC, he was Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for XM Satellite Radio.

He previously held positions at MCI ; later he worked VeriSign, where he oversaw the company's telecommunications unit.

Born in the Pittsburgh suburb of Braddock, Pennsylvania, one of three children of a US Steel worker and a beauty care lecturer, Irvin attended Swissvale High .

He moved into computing positions in the telecommunications industry, and then into senior management positions with several major communications companies, including MFS UUNET, Ameritech, and MCI. Irvin progressed from MCI sales into its marketing team, where he was part of the group that created "Friends & Family" as an economic way of driving revenues to MCI's relatively unknown network against AT&T. He then moved back to Ameritech before a brief stint WorldCom,

After a short stint at internet company e.spire Communications, Irvin was approached by Alfred Mockett and accepted in May 1999 the position of President of the Content and Media Hosting division of BT Ignite, the broadband and Internet services business of British Telecommunications, plc.. Tasked with building a content hosting and media proposition from a poorly developed and wholly UK-centric base, Irvin built the division into a $500 million applications infrastructure business with more than 2,000 employees by buying key assets in France and Germany, and developing a set of world class standards.

However, to build the division Irvin's team needed cash, and after the fallout of the dot.com boom and the drastic need to restructure BT in light of colossal debt, Irvin left BT. He again joined Mockett at American Management Systems (AMS) in February 2002, a business and IT consulting firm whose business at the time was mainly US Government driven, where he was the Executive Vice President of the global communications, media and entertainment division. Irvin was tasked with curtailing the company's declining revenues in its communications practice, where he commented at the time: "I believe that the victors in this new challenge will be the ones that understand how to evolve from traditional long distance revenues into a more Internet-centric, wireless-centric, content-centric world."

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