CENX gained a permanent leader, naming Edward Kennedy as president and CEO at the telecom software company.

Kennedy takes over for CENX interim CEO Kim Butler, who maintains her previous position as CFO at the company. Butler took on the interim CEO role last July when CENX’s previous CEO Ed Ogonek retired.

Kennedy most recently served in a similar position at service assurance provider Tollgrade Communications. Tollgrade was recently acquired by Enghouse Networks for $23 million.

CENX provides service assurance and network analytic tools to telecom operators. The company said its products take in operator network data across multiple domains, and from physical and virtual infrastructure. The data is turned into a real-time visualized network map looking at service topology, inventory, fault, and performance.

CENX garnered strong support earlier this year when it snagged a network functions virtualization (NFV) service assurance deal with Verizon. The deal has CENX providing a unified view on the state of physical and virtual components across multiple network systems and data centers. Kennedy said the company is managing 1 million alarms per week for Verizon.

He said the company is seeing ongoing challenges for service providers in migrating their operations to virtualized environments. He noted that larger operators typically have the resources for such an endeavor, but have a larger amount of legacy operations to migrate.

On the other hand, smaller carriers lack the scale to drive efficiencies in the initial move and the deep pockets to make up for the scaling issue.

“My sense is that everyone is trying to move to the cloud,” Kennedy said. “But, to do that you need to have super reliability and a lower cost point in the network and from the public cloud providers. That remains a challenge for operators both large and small.”

Kennedy also cited the seemingly never-ending challenge for traditional carriers in “trying to avoid being the dumb pipe just transmitting data.”

Earlier this month CENX joined the ETSI Open Source MANO (OSM) project. The firm said it would look to contribute its NFV assurance insight to the OSM community. It also cited ongoing work on the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) initiative.

TOSCA is a data model standard managed by the industry group OASIS that can be used to orchestrate NFV services and applications. CENX sees the TOSCA initiative as a key component of the service provider transition to closed-loop automation.

Moving forward, CENX is set to focus more efforts on its partner program with vendors and operators. It last year announced work with Brocade, Red Hat, and Rift.io to demonstrate service management capabilities in its SDNFV innovation lab.

“We are working together on a go-forward plan with operators, who are increasingly using us as a consultant to learn about best practices,” Kennedy said.