Cyanogen has two new weapons to use in its fight against Google

Cyanogen is gonna need some serious firepower if it wants to deliver on its promise to take Android away from Google, and the company’s decision to hire two key executives from Amazon and Qualcomm is definite a step in the right direction. Both of them are industry veterans, and both will certainly assist Cyanogen as it attempts to expand its footprint and secure more partnerships.   

Cyanogen Inc., a global leader in mobile computing, today announced it has brought on Amazon engineering leader Stephen Lawler as Senior Vice President of Engineering and Qualcomm Android engineering lead Karthick Iyer as Vice President of Global Systems. Lawler will oversee worldwide engineering for the company, and Iyer will lead systems engineering. A twenty-year industry veteran, Lawler joins Cyanogen from Amazon where he was most recently a Vice President. Before that, he spent 15 years at Microsoft in key senior roles including CTO of Bing Maps, GM of Software Development for Bing Maps, Bing Mobile, Local Search, MSN and Virtual Earth. Iyer has held ever increasing engineering responsibilities at Qualcomm Inc. for the past 18 years. Most recently, he was the Vice President of Engineering where he led a global team that designed, developed and commercialized Android solutions at the chipset level. There, he built and led a top-notch global Android organization that successfully enabled the shipments of over 1 billion Android smartphones.