Ericsson to acquire CENX for service assurance

Ericsson agreed to acquire CENX, a privately-held company that offers a hyper-scale service assurance platform across virtual and hybrid networks. Financial terms were not disclosed.

CENX, founded in 2009, is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey. The company achieved significant year-over-year revenue growth in the fiscal year that ended December 31, 2017. CENX employs 185 people.  Ericsson has held a minority stake in CENX since 2012.

Ericsson said the acquisition will boost its Operations Support Systems (OSS) portfolio with vendor-agnostic service assurance and closed-loop automation capability, including in NFV and orchestration.

Mats Karlsson, Head of Solution Area OSS, Ericsson, says: “Dynamic orchestration is crucial in 5G-ready virtualized networks. By bringing CENX into Ericsson, we can continue to build upon the strong competitive advantage we have started as partners. I look forward to meeting and welcoming our new colleagues into Ericsson.”

Closed-loop automation ensures Ericsson can offer its service provider customers an orchestration solution that is optimised for 5G use cases like network slicing, taking full advantage of Ericsson’s distributed cloud offering. Ericsson’s global sales and delivery presence – along with its strong R&D – will also create economies of scale in the CENX portfolio and help Ericsson to offer in-house solutions for OSS automation and assurance.

Ed Kennedy CEO, CENX says: “Ericsson has been a great partner – and for us to take the step to fully join Ericsson gives us the best possible worldwide platform to realize CENX’s ultimate goal – autonomous networking for all. Our closed-loop service assurance automation capability complements Ericsson’s existing portfolio very well. We look forward to seeing our joint capability add great value to the transformation of both Ericsson and its customers.”

• CENX was co-founded in 2009 as a Carrier Ethernet Neutral Exchange by Mr. Nan Chen, who is also the founder and president of MEF.
• Previous investors in CENX have included BDC Capital, Mistral Venture Partners, VMware, Highland Capital Partners, Mesirow Financial Private Equity Inc., Verizon Ventures, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications, Ericsson, DCM Ventures, and Cross Creek Advisors.

CENX lands Tier 1 European contract for service assurance

Tuesday, August 21, 2018  CENX  

CENX announced a contract to provide its hyper-scale service assurance platform to a globally recognized European Tier 1 operator.  CENX's hyper-scale service assurance platform enables closed-loop assurance automation across virtual and hybrid networks.

Under the contract, CENX will support the launch of new digital services and business models across fixed, wireless and data center infrastructure. CENX will enable the operator to assure and monitor its physical and cloud network assets within a single-pane while enabling closed-loop automation to better manage increasing complexity.

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CENX lands Tier 1 European contract for service assurance

CENX announced a contract to provide its hyper-scale service assurance platform to a globally recognized European Tier 1 operator.

CENX's hyper-scale service assurance platform enables closed-loop assurance automation across virtual and hybrid networks.

Under the contract, CENX will support the launch of new digital services and business models across fixed, wireless and data center infrastructure. CENX will enable the operator to assure and monitor its physical and cloud network assets within a single-pane while enabling closed-loop automation to better manage increasing complexity.

"As carriers increase their network investments to launch next-generation services, the complexity to assure these offerings has skyrocketed. Our vision at CENX is to help communication service providers manage the complexity in their networks by providing a platform, which enables true network automation.  Our latest customer win is a reflection of the strength and value of our solution. We have raised the bar for Tier 1 service assurance and are excited to deliver automation across this operator's 20+ networks around the globe," stated Jay McMullan, SVP, Sales & Marketing CENX. 

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CENX: Service Orchestration Encompasses Many Functions

MEF has published its LSO reference architecture. Orchestration encompasses a wide variety of functions, says Marie Fiala Timlin, Director of Marketing for CENX. These capabilities include fulfillment control, security policy, analytics and assurance -- areas that CENX focuses on.

See video: https://youtu.be/QBsh9T5OCD8

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CENX Lands a Tier 1 for its Orchestrated Service Assurance

CENX announced a contract with a Tier 1 global communications service provider based in southern Europe (name not disclosed). CENX systems will be used to orchestrate and assure on-demand cloud and data center services.

CENX’s Exanova Service Intelligence software will enable on-demand deployment and real-time assurance of innovative services for the service provider’s international enterprise and wholesale carrier customers. Initial services will include highly reliable connectivity to the public cloud and data center interconnect (DCI). Using a customer portal, subscribers will be able to order, activate, manage and monitor new cloud connectivity and DCI services, on demand. Exanova automates the workflow of the operations tasks required to fulfil customer requests, interfacing with underlying multi-vendor network infrastructure, thus dramatically reducing the time to deploy new services. For ongoing 24/7 assurance, performance and utilization metrics are ingested and analyzed in real time, to provide operations personnel a unified view of the state of the network for rapid troubleshooting, and to provide corporate customers accurate SLA metrics.

“This win represents a significant addition to our European footprint and we look forward to supporting the growth of our customers in the region as they transform their network operations,” said Jay McMullan, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, CENX. “Exanova Service Intelligence enables new, revenue-generating services, in combination with scalability and extensibility, which together provide a future-proof solution for the quick adoption of NFV and SDN infrastructure.”

htt://www.exanova.com

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#MWC16: Realtime Assurance of Mobile Services in Virtual EPC

CENX, Ixia, Mitel, and VMware are demonstrating real-time assurance of mobile data services in a virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC) at this week's Mobile World Congress 2016.  The demonstration showcases optimized real-time service assurance, within the context of Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO):

• CENX's Exanova Service Intelligence provides end-to-end visualization, performance monitoring, and analysis of the real-time state of services across all segments of the multi-vendor network path, pinpointing fault root cause and impact on subscriber QoE;
• Ixia's IxLoad Wireless delivers full-featured application testing of wireless networks and components, emulating real-world subscriber traffic from LTE and WiFi Offload base stations to mobile core at scale, for fast-tracking new network services with proven quality;
• Mitel's vEPC virtual functions provide the feature-rich, high-performance evolved Packet Data Gateway (ePDG) and Packet Gateway (PGW) platforms for secure connections over untrusted non-3GPP WiFi or 3GPP-compliant LTE access networks;
• VMware vCloud NFV enables CSPs to deploy a unified, multi-vendor and multi-function NFV platform that supports any application at all stages of cloud evolution. The vCloud NFV platform includes production-proven NFVI Solutions, openness in cloud management through VMware Integrated OpenStack and Service Assurance with Day 2 and Ongoing Operations.

"Mobile and NFV technologies continue to innovate at a tremendous pace, and we're excited to be collaborating with industry leaders, Ixia, Mitel, and VMware, to bring comprehensive solutions to market," said Jay McMullan, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, CENX. "With Exanova Service Intelligence's real-time visualization and detailed KPI analytics, operators can quickly navigate their network, isolate faults, and trigger automated workflows for proactive service assurance. This ensures high subscriber satisfaction, driving top line revenues, and also makes the most of infrastructure investment, netting bottom line gains."

http://www.cenx.com

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CENX Raises $12.5 Million for Service Orchestration

CENX, a start-up providing Lifecycle Service Orchestration solutions for software-defined and virtualized networks, raised US$12.5 million in new venture funding.

CENX's solutions automate the fulfillment and assurance of advanced data services in software-defined networks, bridging physical and virtualized network functions.  The company is based in Ottawa.

New investors BDC Capital, Mistral Venture Partners, and VMware joined the Series D financing round, in which all current investors participated: Highland Capital Partners, Mesirow Financial Private Equity Inc., Verizon Ventures, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications, Ericsson, DCM Ventures, and Cross Creek Advisors.

“We welcome the market, business and partnership perspectives that VMware, BDC Capital, and Mistral bring to CENX,” said Ed Ogonek, President and CEO of CENX. “We are seeing tremendous demand worldwide for our Cortx solution, delivering tangible value in today’s networks and empowering the evolution to virtualized networks and services with NFV and SDN. With the support and confidence of our growing investor group, we continue to expand our world-class team to meet these global opportunities.”
 
http://www.cenx.com

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CENX Intros Big Data Scale Lifecycle Service Orchestration

CENX released a new version of its Cortx Service Orchestrator software that harnesses network big data to provide an accurate, real-time view of service providers’ networks.

The Cortx Service Orchestrator can be used for lifecycle management of mobile backhaul, cloud data center exchange, enterprise connectivity, and machine-to-machine communications using IP VPNs, MPLS, Carrier Ethernet, Ethernet Over SONET, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) technologies. New capabilities in Cortx Service Orchestrator Release 5.1 include:

• Expanded scalability and performance supporting the ingest and processing of terabytes of network data per day to enable big data scale visualization, analysis, and real-time alarming on millions of network paths
• Network-oriented real-time search capability that allows hundreds of concurrent users to surf network data using intuitive features such as context-based search suggestions
• Enhanced real-time network performance, utilization, and predictive analytics which correlate and compare disparate data sources to accurately measure and manage network capacity
• Configurable policies for automated bandwidth upgrades through Just-In-Time Capacity Management, reducing upgrade intervals and costs while ensuring customer quality of experience
• Ease-of-deployment and integration, for all types of network architectures and topologies, using machine learning to populate a comprehensive Service Information Model and build a complete view of network paths.  Model integrity is maintained through a continuous audit of hundreds of thousands of network entities per day.

“We have received an overwhelming response from our customers regarding the ease-of-use of our enhanced Cortx Service Orchestrator interface.  The real-time predictive search allows them to rapidly hone in on particular service names, customers, sites, or vendors just by starting to type in the search bar,” said Chris Purdy, CTO of CENX.  “We are defining the future of Service Orchestration by breaking the traditional OSS functional silo mold and providing an extensible, user-friendly platform founded on next-generation open-source technologies.”

http://www.cenx.com/

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CENX Confirms Multi-Million Dollar Service Orchestrator Order

CENX confirmed a new multi-million dollar order from a Tier 1 North American service provider who is extending their Cortx Service Orchestrator deployment throughout their mobile backhaul network.

“This new customer order is a testament to the tremendous value that Cortx Service Orchestrator brings to service provider networks,” said Ed Ogonek, President and CEO of CENX. “We work closely with our customers to deliver on their requirements to gain operational efficiency and increase service agility through programmability.”

Cortx Service Orchestrator is a flexible software product that automates services lifecycle management for a broad set of use cases.  The Just-In-Time Capacity Management solution applies sophisticated algorithms to network big data, to forecast capacity upgrades when and where they are needed to meet user quality expectations, and automates the upgrade process, just-in-time.

http://www.cenx.com

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