Former DJI Senior Director of Public Safety Integration join Auterion as a Vice President

Former DJI Executive, Romeo Durscher, has joined the powerful, open-source drone software platform, Auterion, as Vice President of Public Safety and Cynthia Huang has been appointed as Auterion’s Vice President of Enterprise Business Development.

Huang, who left DJI, where she was the Director of Business Development since 2018, is considered as one of the drone industry’s top executives, as well as, a highly experienced international business leader in the field of emerging technologies. Before she joined DJI, Huan worked over six years at LT-Deta, as Head of Corporate Venture Capital, COO and Director of Business. At Corporate Venture Capital for a global technology company she worked with startups in robotics, analytics, and AI space. She also has experience in corporate development, marketing and brand strategy in public companies and startups.

Huang will provide leadership in the “go-to-market” strategy for Auterion’s impressive enterprise products. This means she will join with enterprise customers in the utility, oil and gas, telecommunications, and mining industries to enable customization and flexibility with Auterion’s “easy-to-use” platform and the ecosystem of manufacturers and independent software vendors, which are expanding rapidly.

Huang, on joining Auterion, stated: 

“As drones play a crucial role for enterprises to continue working in these challenging times, Auterion’s founders and I share a common vision of customizable, open systems for every customer. Auterion’s open-source technology combined with its thriving ecosystem offers the kind of flexibility and personalization that customers simply can’t find with any one proprietary company. Auterion is well-positioned to continue its strong growth trajectory and I look forward to introducing its unique value proposition to new enterprise customers.”* 

Romeo Durscher’s passion for using drones to save lives and improve communities to the Auterion team indicates a shift in the drone industry. A company announcement stated:

“One of the drone industry’s top executives and a highly experienced leader in aerospace and unmanned aerial systems, Romeo joins Auterion from DJI, where he held the role of Senior Director of Public Safety Integration. During Romeo’s six years at DJI he built the Public Safety vertical and through his leadership and drive to bring new technologies to emergency services, he has become a well known and respected thought leader in the space. Prior to joining DJI, Romeo spent twelve years working on NASA’s Heliophysics Mission Solar Dynamics Observatory at Stanford University.”*

Lorenz Meier, co-founder and CEO of Auterion, explained:

“We are thrilled to have Romeo join our senior team as Auterion experiences significant growth, while we continue to deliver product innovation to customers across multiple verticals and use cases. We are transforming the drone industry with an open-source ecosystem, and with Romeo’s extensive expertise and thought leadership in public safety and the drone industry we can meet the very customized need of first responders with cutting-edge drone systems like the Astro so they can work more efficiently.”*

Durscher sees the growth of Auterion’s open source solutions as a step that will help the public safety sector to increasingly embrace drone technology. He explained:

“Open-source has become one of those tech terms we hear a lot and people may also associate certain promises or ideals to it. When I first heard the term ‘open source’, I was imagining hundreds of individual developers sitting in their basements at home, writing code and sharing their creation out of their own goodwill.

While this is the basic concept, in enterprise it’s an R&D process: developers working for companies, being tasked with creating software solutions. These may be small teams working with other small teams at other companies, and because of this open collaboration, progress is made faster, solutions are scalable faster, and the ecosystem can focus on creating additional needed solutions; in both software and hardware.”*

“What is driving future growth are open-standards. Instead of one company creating a standard, by pushing their own proprietary solution, the community, and the industry, are working together on open-standards,”* Durscher explains. 

This enables solutions to be built towards those standards. A drone operator, for instance, only has to learn one user interface, and can also utilize one device to control different manufacturer’s drones. This simplifies and standardizes learning and training thereby making deployment more efficient and offers users greater choice with platforms which use the open-standards.

Durscher states his enthusiasm in partnering with Auterion:

“For me, joining Auterion is something I had really wanted for a long time. We are within a global community of more than 10,000 developers and 750 contributors that drive the definition of standards, and believe in transparency and knowledge sharing, I thrive on that concept.”*

Future

With Romeo Durscher having joined the powerful Auterion, as Vice President of Public Safety, and with Cynthia Huang having been appointed as Auterion’s Vice President of Enterprise Business Development, Auterion is poised to set the standards with transparency and knowledge sharing.

Huang shared her vision by pointing to the crucial role drones play in these challenging times and that she and Auterion’s founders share a common vision of customizable, open systems for every customer.

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