We had great participation for our inaugural FierceTelecom Rising Star series with more than 36,000 readers voting in the poll for their favorite Rising Star. And, the winner is Juniper Networks' Anand Athreya. AT&T’s Amy Wheelus and Dell EMC’s Kevin Shatzkamer took second and third place, respectively.
Last week we published “FierceTelecom presents its inaugural class of Rising Stars” listing 9 top executives on the rise in the telecom industry. The list includes executives from some of the nation’s largest telcos and public clouds as well as those from top vendors.
Athreya, who is currently EVP and chief development officer at Juniper Networks, is a 15-year veteran of the company. He says his biggest challenge is figuring out how to drive common software architectures across all product lines. He says he has had success at Juniper by creating smaller teams and giving them specific problems to solve. “Smaller teams help you investigate problems and do rapid prototyping,” he said. “Once it gets to a certain mass, then you make sure it can be absorbed into the bigger system.”
Here are the full results of the poll:
For those of you who voted, thanks so much for participating. And congratulations again to all of our 2019 Rising Stars.