Cox Communications refreshed its leadership team with a new CTO, COO and chief marketing and sales officer, choosing from among its own ranks to make the appointments. Len Barlik will serve as Cox’s CTO, while Colleen Langner was promoted to chief operations officer and Mark Lawson stepped into the chief marketing and sales post.
The new CTO replaces Kevin Hart, who held a position as the company’s chief product and technology officer for more than a decade before being tapped to fill the CEO role at Cox-owned fiber provider Segra earlier this month. Cox closed a deal to acquire Segra’s enterprise and carrier business in October. Hart’s appointment followed the installation of a new CTO, COO, chief legal officer and chief people officer at Segra in November.
Barlik has been with Cox for more than 10 years as its executive vice president of product development and management. Going forward, he will have oversight of the company’s product and technology innovation, including the development of new offerings for residential and business customers. He will also be in charge of the company’s network transformation initiative focused making network upgrades to support future residential and enterprise needs.
In October, Cox executives said the company had already deployed distributed access architecture and Remote PHY devices across 30% or more of its network and was planning to implement a high-split “soon”.
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Mark Greatrex, Cox Communications president, in a statement hailed Barlik as “a true innovator with a proven track record of bringing compelling new products and services to market.” He added “his ability to take a long-range, strategic vision, create a sense of urgency and move organizations to deliver on strategy makes him the natural choice to shape the future of product and technology development at Cox.”
Greatrex himself was only recently promoted to lead Cox, succeeding longtime CEO Patrick Esser following his retirement at the end of 2021.
Cox’s new COO Langner has been with the company for 26 years, most recently serving as SVP of field operations with oversight of field operations and vendor management. She also previously held a leadership role in marketing, heading Cox’s residential strategy and execution.
Lawson, meanwhile, most recently served as SVP of digital and has spent 8 years at Cox leading its digital marketing and transformation efforts. The company credited him in a press release with helping it drive “significant increases” in the number of digital customer transactions.