CenturyLink CTO Andrew Dugan raked in the most votes to win FierceTelecom's top movers and shakers voters' poll.
Dugan, who took over as CenturyLink's CTO on Nov. 7, won with 4,631 votes for a total of 37%. Coming in second place was Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins with 3,783 votes (35%), followed by Juniper Networks CTO Bikash Koley with 1,157 votes (11%). A total of 10,937 votes were cast.
Koley posted an early lead in the voting but was surpassed by Robbins. Dugan's votes swelled over the final days of the poll to take the top spot from Robbins.
And unlike some counties in Florida, FierceTelecom's voting closed as planned on Thursday after a week of voting.
RELATED: Special Report—Vote for the top mover and shaker in the telecom industry
It has been a busy year for CenturyLink as the company has worked to integrate Level 3 into the fold after buying it last year for $34 billion. The acquisition of Level 3 increased CenturyLink's on-net buildings by nearly 75% to approximately 75,000, including 10,000 buildings in EMEA and Latin America.
Prior to reaching global status with Level 3's networking assets, CenturyLink grew beyond its Louisiana roots by buying Embarq and Qwest, which gave it deeper local and national fiber assets.
This year, CenturyLink has used those Level 3 assets for a global launch of its SD-WAN service, which was announced in September. CenturyLink has also bulked up its cloud presence by being named as a Managed Service Provider Partner by Amazon Web Services.
CenturyLink also struck up a partnership with Oracle Cloud over the summer, and it announced support earlier this year for Google Cloud Partner Interconnect, a service from Google Cloud that allows customers to connect to the Google Cloud Platform from anywhere in the world.
While Dugan is new to the role of CTO at CenturyLink, he held that same position for a little over a year at Level 3. All told, Dugan spent 19 years at Level 3 before moving over to CenturyLink.
All of the people named in FierceTelecom's top 25 movers and shakers share the common traits of not only being innovators in their respective areas of technology but also of sharing that expertise across the industry. Whether it's open source communities, standards development organizations, serving on boards or speaking at conferences and other industry events, the top 25 movers and shakers have made their collective presence known in the industry.
For those of you who voted, thanks so much for taking the time to participate. Congratulations again to all of the top 25 movers and shakers in the telecommunications industry. — Mike
