Girish Varma is co-chair of the ATIS CIO Council and was CIO at Qwest for the last five years. Today he is embroiled in the immense task of merging Qwest with CenturyTel to form the IT backbone of CenturyLink. He will surely rely on his technical leadership experience at Bell Labs. Varma was one of only four senior level executives retained after the Qwest merger. He is businessman first, technologist second and will bring his sense of what a low-cost, high-value IT structure can mean to a company. Varma said in an interview with InformationWeek that he learned not to get enamored with technology for its own sake but for what it can do for people. Given the economy in which service providers have to continue to do more with less, these influences should pay off for CenturyLink.