CenturyLink’s Aamir Hussain joins MEF board of directors
Appointments

CenturyLink’s Aamir Hussain joins MEF board of directors

Aamir Hussain, chief technology officer (CTO) of CenturyLink has been appointed to the board of directors at the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).

Hussain has over 25 years’ experience in the global technology industry and has been CTO at CenturyLink since 2014. For them he oversees the company’s worldwide network, technology transformation, architecture and innovation roadmap, which includes product development, network virtualization, IT operations, digital platform development, physical/network security, and network, cloud and managed services.

Commenting on Hussain’s appointment, Nan Chen, president of MEF, said: “We are delighted to have Aamir Hussain join the MEF Board and appreciate the depth of insight he brings as the CTO of one of the world’s largest and most innovative service providers. We have an extraordinary Board team with the talent and experience to help us accelerate the rollout of MEF 3.0 services and technologies on a worldwide basis. We look forward to making exciting progress in coming quarters.”

Hussain joins a board of existing service and technology provider executives, in addition to a number of senior experts who are guiding the organisation through its MEF 3.0 initiative, which aims to transform the communications industry.

The existing board consists of:

Aamir Hussain, executive vice president and chief technology officer at CenturyLink.

Alessandro Talotta, chairman and chief executive officer at Sparkle.

Eric Puetz, director of standards and industry alliances at AT&T Labs.

Gabriel Kerner, vice president network products and offerings at Amdocs Technology.

Kevin O'Toole, senior vice president of product management at Comcast Business.

Michael Strople, president of enterprise networks at Zayo Group.

Nan Chen, executive vice chairman at CENX.

Ralph Santitoro, head of SDN/NFV solutions practice at Fujitsu Network Communications.

Scott Mansfield, standardisation researcher of development unit network products at Ericsson.

Shahar Steiff, assistant vice president of new technology at PCCW Global.

Shawn Hakl, senior vice president of business products at Verizon.

The MEF board is focused on expanding the community of service providers, technology vendors, and other companies that are committed to MEF 3.0, which aims to define, deliver, and certify agile, assured, and orchestrated services across a global ecosystem of automated networks. MEF 3.0 blends sophisticated, standardised services with an emerging suite of Lifecycle Service Orchestration APIs to provide an on-demand, cloud-centric experience with unprecedented user- and application-directed control over network resources and service capabilities.

The MEF originally unveiled its plans for MEF 3.0 at its MEF17 event in Orlando, Florida which took place in November.

Speaking at the event, Chen said: "MEF 3.0 is the … next step in our journey to transform the industry with services and networks that are easy to manage and monetise, and that deliver lasting value to its customers. We are unleashing the full potential of industry innovation by enabling dynamic services to be orchestrated across multiple provider networks powered by LSO, SDN and NFV."

Hussain spoke exclusively with Capacity for our August/September issue of Capacity magazine, where he discusses the now completed acquisition of Level 3 Communications. To read the full interview please click here

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