Vivek Shaiva joined La Quinta as their Chief Information Officer in 2007 and provides leadership over all their information systems including systems architecture, technology enabled process optimizations, quality assurance, telecom and IT infrastructure. Prior to joining the company, he was Senior Vice President, Enterprise Architecture for the management company that handles mergers and acquisition for the Blackstone Group's real estate hospitality portfolio. In this role he oversaw projects related to information technology architecture and process optimizations driving operational and cost efficiencies and revenue growth across the portfolio companies including Luxury Resorts and Hotels, Extended Stay Hotels, La Quinta Inns and Suites and Center Parcs, UK.

Before he started his engagements with the Blackstone Group, Vivek served as Director of Software Architecture at NBC Universal-GE in New York providing leadership to many enterprise wide information systems projects. Vivek has represented NBC Universal at GE wide organizations including the Application Architecture Board, Software Development Council and Enterprise Data Modeling Committee. He authored a unique Service Oriented framework that leveraged reusable application components and resulted in multi-million dollar cost savings. He was nominated for the prestigious GE Edison Award for Technical Innovation for his work on a real-time predictive elections results management system. He published a paper titled "Designing Adaptive Components for a Services Oriented Architecture" at IEEE Research and Education Conference in 2003.

Before joining NBC Universal-GE, Vivek spent 10 years in various senior IT consulting assignments across the US including lead architect at Sotheby's New York and development of credit card management systems at Mercedes Benz Credit Corporation. He has also led large scale database engineering and optimization initiatives in various leading telecommunications organizations including AT&T, MCI-Worldcom, and Excel Telecommunications.