Former CenturyLink CTO Aamir Hussain has landed at Verizon Business as its senior vice president and chief product officer, and re-gained a seat on MEF's board of directors.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Hussain was hired by Verizon Business last month. Hussain was CenturyLink's CTO for just over four years before he was replaced by current CTO Andrew Dugan in 2018. Dugan was previously CTO of Level 3 prior to it being bought by CenturyLink.
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Hussain was on MEF's board of directors prior to his departure from CenturyLink. Dugan took over that seat and still currently serves on MEF's board. Prior to Thursday's announcement, Verizon's Shawn Hakl, senior vice president of business products, served on MEF's board for the past two years.
“We welcome Aamir to the board of directors again, as his insight gained from leading some of the world’s largest service providers and now being an integral part of the Verizon team, is beyond valuable,” said MEF President Nan Chen, in a statement. “We are extremely thankful for the time Shawn devoted to MEF and its initiatives. He is a distinguished member of our community and the communications industry, and he’s made outstanding contributions that continue to propel our efforts forward."
Hussain was hired as CenturyLink's CTO in 2014. He played a key role in transforming CenturyLink from a legacy telco into an IT-based services company by leveraging software and network functions virtualization (NFV) and cloud-based IP services.
Under Hussain's watch, CenturyLink launched its Programmable Services Backbone, which was first rolled out in 2015 and then relaunched in March of 2018 with CenturyLink's Victor orchestration software and OpenStack.
Prior to his new role at Verizon Business, Hussain was CEO of Collinear Networks for just over a year. Hussain is a venture partner at RIDGE-LANE Limited Partners.