As a member of CenturyLink’s senior leadership team Pang is undoubtedly a busy person driving cross-regional revenue growth for the entire company, but Capacity North America still remains a key event on her annual calendar, and Capacity was curious to know why?
“Capacity North America is a quintessential event for decision makers across the spectrum, says Pang. “The event is a wonderful opportunity to build relationships and gain insights from the communication infrastructure community. I know I’m looking forward to sharing my insights and hearing from other experts.”
Little more than nine months after the completion of the $34 billion Level 3 acquisition and Pang says that the integration process is “going well” and that the company has identified a number of new synergies in addition to the predicted $1 billion worth of network synergies made by CTO Aamir Hussain back in 2017.
“We are also finding synergies in how we expand our network more cost effectively, justify bringing more customer locations on net, and investing in our delivery platforms.”
In addition, Pang says a number of CenturyLink and Level 3’s products and services are very complementary creating added value for the end user.
“CenturyLink’s hybrid cloud management capabilities combined with Level 3’s global CloudConnect platform is an example of our ability to provide more comprehensive solutions for our customers because of the acquisition,” she says.
Encouraging women in telecoms is topic close to Pang’s heart and one that she says she has been talking about lately.
“Dude-dominated images of programmers, the lack of female role models and broader social attitudes toward women in tech, if left unchecked, are going to lead to resource constraints for the tech industry and global economic challenges, she says. “I know we can change things. It begins with strong female mentors and role models in the tech industry and a culture that encourage women to pursue technology careers.”
So how is CenturyLink changing this and challenging this narrative? “Not only are we looking at our pipeline of talented women and how we can do a better job of creating a work environment that understands the demands of the modern world; we are investing in programs where leaders from across the company can get out into the community and share with young women the stories behind their passion for technology. Hopefully, this will inspire the next generation of women to embrace careers in technology,” she says.
Like many others in the sector, SD-WAN is just as well talked about for the likes of CenturyLink as well as most enterprises and Pang says, “we too are very excited about SD-WAN.”
“Coupled with a robust security platform like CenturyLink’s security solutions, enterprises can experience the value of improved performance & resiliency, efficient growth, and improved security, effectively future-proofing the technology that drives business,” she explains.
As the company settles in its recently acquired Level 3 teams and continues to sync up its various operations and procedures, the roadmap moving forward according to Pang is simplification for the customer and one way the company plans on doing that is through its products.
“We are focused on a unified offer for our highest performing products, specifically Ethernet services and waves. Our unified offer will enable us to provide these services to our more than 130,000 on-net buildings globally, including the key capabilities our customers require. As part of this initiative, we have enhanced our software-defined managed services platform for the hybrid cloud environment to improve and simplify the user experience. But all of these individual initiatives are driven by the overall goal of creating integrated digital delivery solutions encompassing all of our capabilities from fibre-to-the-cloud.”
