Former Qwest CEO Ed Mueller Resigning from CenturyLink Board

Ed Mueller, the CEO who oversaw the sale of Qwest Communications to CenturyLink, is resigning from the CenturyLink board one year before the official end of his term.

Mueller led Qwest from late 2007 until last April, when the smaller CenturyLink closed its $22 billion Qwest acquisition. He then took a seat on the CenturyLink board but is departing as of late May, according to The Denver Post. CenturyLink isn’t commenting on the development.

The news comes as CenturyLink has cut about 700 jobs in Colorado over the past year; Qwest was headquartered in Denver but CenturyLink kept Monroe, La., as the combined company’s home base. Because of that, CenturyLink has eliminated redundant positions, mostly in accounting and administration.

Then, in late March, CenturyLink announced a reorganization of its divisions. As of April 1, CenturyLink folded the Business Markets Group (BMG) into the new Enterprise Markets Group (EMG), which continues to sell through channel partners. Chris Ancell headed BMG but the restructuring put him out of a job. Jim Ousley, CEO of Savvis, the cloud and hosted IT services company CenturyLink bought last year for $2.5 billion, now oversees EMG, which is based in Denver.

EMG serves national and international BMG customers, all Savvis customers and federal government clients. Savvis had been operating as a separate unit.

"The new EMG organization will better match our sales and support with the product and solution needs of our customers," CenturyLink spokeswoman Stephanie Meisse told Channel Partners in March.