ProQuest has named Rich Belanger as senior vice president and general manager of its Books business unit. Roger Valade has been promoted to Chief Technology Officer. Kevin Sayar, co-founder of ebrary and leader of the ProQuest Books team since 2011, is taking on an advisory role where his expertise will continue to help ProQuest’s Books business grow and thrive.
Belanger joined ProQuest in 2012 as the company’s Chief Information Officer, leading the company’s global product development, user experience (UX), content operations, security, internal applications, and all global technology infrastructure teams. His many achievements include significant platform improvements, including the nearly seamless migration of the ProQuest platform to Apache Solr running in the Amazon public cloud, and migration of libraries around the world to Ebook Central. He strengthened IT infrastructure and pioneered new public cloud, security and privacy initiatives while also delivering a new award-winning UX framework that has unified the ProQuest user experience. Further, Belanger delivered content and technology initiatives that have transformed editorial processes and doubled the amount of new content being ingested.
Valade has been with ProQuest since 2013, serving as its vice president of engineering. During that time, he worked with Belanger to migrate the ProQuest platform to the Amazon cloud and led the consolidation of legacy platforms on to more strategic, user-oriented ProQuest platforms. After the acquisitions of Alexander Street and Pi2, Valade led the integration of their engineering teams into ProQuest’s Global Product Development organization. Additionally, he was instrumental in streamlining ProQuest’s product development operations, improving platform availability and speed-to-market for new releases.
Belanger and Valade are based in ProQuest’s Ann Arbor headquarters. They assumed their new roles on February 1.
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