Pinpointing 2011's top 10 competitive provider executives

Sean Buckley, FierceTelecomI'd like to call your attention to our 2011 top 10 competitive provider leaders feature, in which FierceTelecom profiles the executives changing the dynamics of the competitive telecom industry.  

The past year has seen a number of changes taking place in the industry as a number of regional and even national players consolidated through targeted mergers and acquisitions.

Take Bill LaPerch, president and CEO of AboveNet (NYSE: ABVT), a service provider that's found a sizeable niche providing large businesses, including financial houses, with fiber-based high bandwidth connectivity solutions. While he has yet to make a major acquisition move yet because he has not found the right priced deal, industry watchers believe that LaPerch will likely make a big deal to expand the service provider's network in 2011 or 2012 to provide more connectivity options to emerging cloud service players.

Then, there's Vincent Oddo, president and CEO of Birch Communications, who is growing the CLEC through targeted acquisitions. In October, Oddo and his team completed its acquisition of Cordia Networks--its twelfth since he took the helm of the CLEC in 2006.

But as you'll see in this feature, the competitive telecom race is just not about traditional CLECs. The year 2011 also saw the rise of two cable executives, namely Jim McGann, senior vice president of Charter Business (Nasdaq: CHTR) and Bill Stemper, president of Comcast Business (Nasdaq: CMCSA). Both aggressively ramped up their respective companies' metro fiber networks to fulfill larger business and wholesale wireless backhaul opportunities.   

The feature also chronicles other emerging executives like former Broadwing executive Ernest Cunningham, president and CEO of One Source Networks, which is helping simplify the communications buying process for multisite business. We also called out GWI's VP of infrastructure David Allen, who is helping to drive the provider's middle mile network to connect Maine to other major Internet hubs in Boston and New York; and finally Mammoth Networks, whose CEO Brian Worthen is advancing the cause to provide alternative wholesale services to Tier 2-3 service providers.  

I encourage you to take a look at this new feature and let us know what you think.--Sean