Former CenturyLink Cloud Exec Lands New Job

**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in November.**

The former chief technology officer of CenturyLink’s Innovations Lab is now a top executive at Automic, a business automation company.

John Purrier left on Sept. 5 following CenturyLink CTO Aamir Hussain’s announcement in August of a planned reorganization. Purrier now is Automic’s chief technology officer.

CenturyLink also lost its top two cloud executives with the Dec. 1 departures of Jared Wray and Jonathan King. Wray left to pursue other opportunities, while King is now Ericsson’s head of cloud strategy.

A Fortune report this week noted how smaller, second-tier public cloud providers, including giant telephone companies trying to build cloud businesses, are struggling to keep up with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

Justin Lopinot, CenturyLink spokesman, told Channel Partners that Purrier was an employee for the Innovations Lab, “a small part of the CTO organization charged with building and contributing toward open-source projects.”

“As such, he wasn’t part of the large and robust CenturyLink Cloud platform development team,” he said. “He had one direct report, so they were two of the 17 people working in the lab” — his departure not being a major blow to the company’s IT pursuits.

Last spring, Andrew Higginbotham, who led all of CenturyLink’s cloud and managed-services businesses, left the company after more than 13 years. He played a key role in CenturyLink’s acquisition of Savvis in 2011, in addition to the company’s purchases of the assets of Ciber’s IT outsourcing business in 2012, and platform-as-a-service provider AppFog and public cloud provider Tier 3 in 2013.

Despite the departures, Lopinot said cloud services and platform innovation remain a key focus, with a team of developers, engineers and product management actively developing new features that continue to enhance the CenturyLink Cloud and platform.

In his Dec. 2 blog, Hussain said CenturyLink has “exceptional leadership in place – not just on the technology front, but across the board. And our teams are committed to ensuring customer satisfaction by putting our customers at the center of what we do.”

“We look forward to sharing even more details in the coming year about the value unlocked by our hybrid IT portfolio and the winning combinations we can offer through cloud, managed hosting, network and other solutions,” he said.