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Lori Sofianek is a Senior Vice President of Cassara Management Group, Inc. based in Rochester, NY. Ms. Sofianek has more than 22 years of experience in the telecommunications sector. She has provided leadership in many different areas of the business including customer service, order management, provisioning, billing and collections, sales and sales support. Ms. Sofianek was hired in 1983 by Rochester Telephone's long distance division, RCI, to head the first direct sales force for long distance and private line services. After 2 years in sales, Ms. Sofianek followed an operations path which proved to be her passion. As Rochester Telephone and RCI acquired local and long distance companies, Ms. Sofianek took on roles of increasing responsibility. In her last position at Global Crossing (formerly Frontier and RCI) she was the vice president of global customer support for the $2 billion wholesale division. Throughout her 17 years at the Rochester Telephone Companies Ms. Sofianek had the opportunity to work at the long distance, telephone equipment and local divisions. In 1993 she was tapped to oversee all aspects of operational readiness for the first competitive local exchange provider (CLEC) in the country. The scope of her responsibilities included negotiating interconnection and collocation agreements and creating viable processes for ordering, provisioning, repair management, operator services, moves, adds and changes, PIC processing and wholesale billing. Much of what was developed in the Rochester market became the template for other larger telephone companies that opened their markets to competition. In recent years, Ms. Sofianek has provided counseling to the senior leadership teams of many telecom companies, including Pangea, a European facilities based carrier, ACN a global direct marketing company for local, long distance, mobile and energy services and Americatel, a reseller of long distance services in the Hispanic marketplace. Ms. Sofianek lives in Webster, NY with her husband and two girls. | 