Our Company
Kevin Kennedy
President & Chief
Executive Officer
Kevin Kennedy is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Avaya Inc., a leading global provider of business communications applications, systems and services.
Prior to joining the company in January 2009, Dr. Kennedy was President and CEO of JDS Uniphase Corporation, a position he held since September 2003. Before joining JDSU, Dr. Kennedy served as Chief Operating Officer of Openwave Systems, Inc., a position he held from August 2001 to September 2003. Prior to joining Openwave Systems, he spent close to eight years at Cisco Systems, Inc., most recently as senior vice president of the Service Provider Line of Business and Software Technologies Division.
Earlier in his career, he spent 17 years with AT&T Bell Laboratories.
In 1987, Dr. Kennedy was a Congressional Fellow to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology. In January 2011, he was appointed to the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee by U.S. President Barack Obama.
He currently serves on the boards of directors of JDSU and KLA-Tencor Corporation. Until January 2009, he was a member of the board of directors of Polycom, Inc.
He holds a B.S. in engineering from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, as well as M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering from Rutgers University. He was an adjunct professor at Rutgers from 1982-1984 and has published more than 30 papers on computational methods, data networking and issues of technology management.
In 2006, Dr. Kennedy was honored by the School of Engineering at Rutgers as their Alumnus of the Year and awarded an Alumni Medal of Excellence. He is a co-author of "Going the Distance: Why Some Companies Dominate and Others Fail," published in 2003.
