As Practice Leader at RampRate Sourcing Advisors and Strategic Research, Steve Lerner helps clients plan their business and technology operations, launch products, choose the best technologies, and benchmark performance.

Steve has worked on large-scale internet operations and content delivery since 1993. He was Vice President of Operations and Media Technology at Speedera Networks where he oversaw Speedera's entire network, comprising 80 datacenters, thousands of servers, purchasing, SLAs and customer-service operations. Speedera's CDN offered web caching, whole-site delivery, global load balancing, software downloads, global DNS service and streaming. Speedera was purchased by Akamai Technologies Inc. in 2005.

At Speedera Networks, he also built, managed and sold that company's streaming CDN service. Speedera's client list included Intel, HP, Sony, Microsoft, Trend Micro, the U.S. Department of Justice, CBS, Home Depot, Univision, Amazon.com, NASA, USA Today, and Fox" "American Idol." Some of those clients came to Speedera through its partnership with RampRate. Before Speedera, Steve built one of the world's first internationally distributed streaming CDNs at TEN-TV, a business broadcaster acquired by LoudEye Corp. At TEN-TV, Steve authored a patent describing a load-balanced global CDN with satellite-fed encoding systems. TEN-TV's customers included IBM and HP.

Steve's media and content technology experience began while working at Sonic Solutions, a Lucasfilm spinoff and Emmy award winner for its pioneering work in audio technology. While at Sonic, he was a sales and QA engineer for the first generation of high-bandwidth distributed audio and video editing systems. Alongside his digital media work, Steve gained deep experience in the music and film industries. He spent a year as road manager for Grammy winning musician George Winston, and was a sound engineer for the English Patient, Oscar winner for Best Sound and Best Picture in 1996.