Leadership
After developing technical products and bringing them to market for over 25 years, conferencing industry veterans Craig Richardson, Steve Joiner, and Tom Drewes formed Aveo Systems with the goal of simplifying how these products are used, controlled, and managed by organizations.
What We Do
Aveo Systems makes it easy to control and manage audio visual systems. With Aveo’s Mira Connect touch panels and Mira Portal cloud management platform, a professionally designed control system is easily created, without any programming. Simply select the equipment, enable the desired options, and the room is ready!
Mira Connect enables integration partners to deliver professionally designed systems without the programming complexity, bugs and cost of traditional control systems. Users get an easy-to-use system with a common user experience across various rooms and equipment, improving their productivity and maximizing the value of their collaboration solution.
Who We Are
Craig H. Richardson
CEO
Craig began his career developing and implementing real-time digital signal processing (DSP) voice and video algorithms at Atlanta Signal Processors, Inc. (ASPI), a company founded by DSP pioneers Drs. Thomas P. Barnwell, Ronald W. Schafer, and Russell M. Mersereau. After Craig became President and CEO of ASPI, he focused the company, renamed ASPI Digital, on audio conferencing devices including the EchoFree EF400, the first acoustic echo canceller product with integrated noise cancellation that automatically reduced the room noise transmitted to the remote participants, reducing listener fatigue and increasing intelligibility.
Craig holds an Sc.B. in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, and M.S.E.E and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering specializing in Digital Signal Processing from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
While at ASPI Digital, Craig led the team that designed, manufactured, and sold the award-winning EchoFree Vortex multi-channel acoustic echo canceller with integrated automatic microphone mixing and matrixing. Following Polycom’s acquisition of ASPI Digital, Craig continued as the General Manager and Vice-President of Polycom’s Installed Voice Business bringing new products and services to market including the SoundStructure products and accessories including the VoIP telephony interface. During part of this time he also served as the interim Vice President and General Manager of Polycom’s Voice Division, responsible for the entire portfolio of Voice Products including the popular Polycom SoundStation, SoundPoint IP, and wireless telephony product lines.
Most recently Craig served as the Vice-President for Global Sales at Symetrix, a DSP audio company, growing the company 35% in 18 months. While at Symetrix, he led the sales teams, defined new products and services, shaped the corporate messaging, and created and executed the go-to-market strategy of Symetrix’s entire product portfolio including the Radius AEC audio conferencing products.
Craig is an author of the Handbook for Sound Engineers from Focal Press, a co-author of the book Speech Coding: A Computer Laboratory Textbook by John Wiley & Sons, an adjunct instructor at Infocomm, has seven patents, and has presented numerous audio foundation and conferencing seminars at Infocomm shows and other events.
Steve Joiner
Vice President, Engineering
Steve started his career at ASPI Digital developing software and hardware solutions including the EchoFree EF200 and EF1210 audio conferencing products, then went on to lead the engineering team that developed the Vortex audio conferencing processor, raising the bar for installed audio functionality and performance. He continued to lead the engineering team after ASPI was acquired by Polycom and led the development on the SoundStructure series of installed audio conferencing devices, a product family known for its ease of use, performance, and quality.
Steve holds a B.S. in Physics and M.S.E.E. from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Tom Drewes
Vice President, User Experience
Tom comes to Aveo Systems with fifteen years of experience in software development for user interfaces and user experience design, most recently as Principal Engineer at Polycom. At Polycom he designed SoundStructure Studio as well as contributed to Polycom Group Series, Polycom Touch Control, and Polycom Trio.
Tom holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Iowa and a M.S. in human-computer interaction from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His focus in recent years has been to improve experiences across the user spectrum, from the AV integrators of complex systems to the end users in the conference room.
