21 Facts About Tony Bates

Anthony J Bates was born on 29 April 1967 and is a British born business leader.

Tony Bates first applied his experience to large-scale consumer products and services following Cisco's acquisition of the Scientific Atlanta set-top box business, and subsequently as Chief Executive Officer of Skype Technologies.

Tony Bates published a number of IETF RFCs and holds a number of patents.

On 6 May 2019 Tony Bates was appointed to CEO of Genesys.

Tony Bates was raised in Teddington by his hairdresser mother and stepfather who worked as a builder.

Tony Bates dropped out of his mechanical engineering program at South Bank Polytechnic.

Tony Bates left the University of London Computer Centre in 1992 to work in Amsterdam on a Reseaux Associes pour la Recherche Europeenne -funded project as part of the RIPE NCC, an organization responsible for establishing the Europe IP registry and a number of operational standards for European networking.

Tony Bates worked on the strategy and operation for the Internet MCI IP backbone.

Tony Bates was employed at Cisco for more than 14 years and rose to senior vice president and general manager, heading up the enterprise, commercial and small business divisions.

Tony Bates said that once he joined as CEO, a key engineer in Estonia asked him how long he had been using Skype.

Tony Bates said in 2004, and when they ran the details of his Skype ID to verify, the engineer admitted that Bates started using Skype before he had.

When Tony Bates joined Skype, only 6.5 percent of its users paid to make calls from their computers to landline or mobile devices.

Tony Bates was looking for ways to monetize Skype and envisioned extending Skype beyond recreational and video calling.

In 2010, Tony Bates made plans to offer paid premium phone and video services such as group videoconferencing, call waiting and answering services.

When Skype was officially acquired by Microsoft for $8.5 billion in May 2011, Tony Bates announced that he wanted to eventually reach 1 billion connected users on Skype.

In September 2011, Tony Bates announced an initiative called, Skype in the Classroom, with the goal of connecting 1 million teachers.

Rumors circulated that Tony Bates was in the running to be the next CEO at Microsoft when Steve Ballmer announced his plans to the position in 2013.

Tony Bates was widely reported to be one of two internal candidates considered by the board for the role.

In November 2016, GoPro announced that President Tony Bates would be stepping down at the end of 2016.

Tony Bates joined the $1.5Bn corporation during a period of rapid growth, with more than 5,000 employees globally.

Tony Bates served on the board on the Silicon Valley-based nonprofit Tipping Point Community from June 2012 to July 2020.