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Celona CEO On How Private 5G Will Be The 'Fastest-Growing' Enterprise Networking Segment In Next Two Years
‘You have more and more AI in the end device, and you have more and more AI in edge, and you can't really make use of either of those investments without a good wireless edge. I think private 5G is going to be a big player, if not the primary technology,’ Celona Co-Founder and CEO Rajeev Shah tells CRN.
Founded in 2019 by a team of telecom and networking pros, private wireless provider Celona got in on the ground floor with enterprise 5G. Now, the company is poised to help more partners get in on the action.
Campbell, Calif.-based Celona added as many new enterprise customers last year as the company had in its first three years of existence, while expanding globally outside the U.S. into regions such as Saudi Arabia, Korea, and Mexico. It’s indicative of a mature 5G technology in which businesses are increasingly asking for and seeing the value. But if solution providers don't get involved, they could lose out on business to another partner that is offering private cellular today, according to Rajeev Shah, co-founder and CEO of Celona.
To make it easier for partners, Celona at the end of last year made significant changes to its partner program. The revamped program today offers a slew of new resources and education, as well as new competency levels to meet partners where they are. Private 5G has the potential of becoming a significant enterprise networking segment, similar to the now table stakes Wi-Fi market, Shah said, especially as companies deploy more AI application and edge AI use cases.
Shah spoke with CRN about the work Celona has been doing in the last year as demand for enterprise-grade private 5G has taken off, the new partner program, and how significant the private 5G opportunity is for solution providers right now.
Here are excerpts from the conversation.
How has Celona expanded its business in the last year as demand for private 5G ramped up?
At a company level for us, a lot of it is just repeating and scaling. For the past two years [we've been] seeing consistent and growing demand for private 5G in some key industrial verticals — manufacturing, petrochemicals, oil and gas, logistics, transportation, and maybe a few on the edges, like construction and retail and so on. What repeat and scale to us looks like is, we have a lot more accounts — something to the effect of double the total number of enterprise customers within the last year. When you think of our four-year trajectory, the number of customers we had in the first three years; we added that many within one year. That is exciting. The second part of it is they are a lot more global in nature, which is both, number one, customers themselves that we win in U.S., Europe, etc., tend to have locations globally. I think that's a big part of it. But we are also winning customers all over the world. We have customers this year in Saudi Arabia, Korea, Turkey and in Mexico. We have pipeline growing in Brazil, etc. I think that is the main area of focus -- probably is 80 percent of our life is repeat and scale of private 5G in those industrial verticals.
I think the second major thing that we view as market expansion into new areas is, for a while now, we have been working with the operators on the neutral host concept, and I think that has approached true maturity-level as we got certified in the beginning of the year with T-Mobile and at the end of the year with AT&T, and now we are starting to see a lot of demand from that, and that opens up a whole new set of verticals -- higher ed, healthcare, general enterprise -- in addition to the industries using it as a value-add. So, I think for us, we have been just laser-focused on those initiatives internally and for us, the exciting part is the rate of adoption and rate of demand is just growing exponentially, and we are seeing that, I think, reflected in the kind of announcements we made. Our customers have told us that [private cellular] is the wireless network in these industrial environments that [they] use for mission critical use cases. And if you're going to do that, then security is not an afterthought, and you need to think of it from the ground-up. [These customers] always liked our architecture, and they pushed us even further, and that led to an announcement called Aerloc [a suite of security capabilities for private 5G]. That level of scale requires a serious partner program. And so, we upleveled our existing channel program.
Tell us about the recently revamped partner program?
We had our channel program since 2022, and we call it the Fanatics channel program, and it was a relatively simple channel program primarily focused on the U.S. back when we announced it. Over the last nine months leading up to the launch, we made it a little bit more classic in terms of sophistication, so we now have three tiers of the channel program. The three tiers map to, both how much investment and competency we see from the partner side, and there are requirements in terms of how many engineers need to be certified on our certification program, how much presence do they need to have in different parts of the world, or are they U.S. focused, regional focus, etc., and also, we have special criteria [for] capabilities around security, managed services, etc. So, three tiers with competency levels, and the channel program itself has grown. We have close to 150 channel partners now across all those levels. At the highest level, what we call the Global Preferred Partners, we have Verizon as a very key partner and NTT Data has been [another] great partner for a while, but in the last year, we have added Tech Mahindra, Capgemini and we have added a few more in that level. The next tier is what we call the Preferred Partners and we have [companies] like INS, Black Box, etc. at that level. And then there are partners who are just starting the journey in the first level. So, the certification program, enablement programs, global presence; all of that has been added into the channel program that we just launched.
Has 5G reached maturity?
I think [there’s] a natural education curve. I think all the value prop that we have always known private 5G can bring to enterprises, I think now finally, that message has reached. There are case studies. There are the first few customers to show the other prospects on what is possible, how clear the ROI is. There is a device ecosystem from Zebra, Honeywell, Apple; everything now very robustly available. So, I think all of that adds up. Twelve months back, 5 out of 10 conversations would be educational. We would just be informing customers of what's possible. Now, 9 out of 10 conversations are highly educated customers coming to us saying: "We know this technology can do this. We have talked to these other customers in our market cohort and we have seen they're doing this. We are now looking for the best provider to give us these solutions." So, very concrete projects and moving forward. We're certainly seeing market maturity.
There's one customer of ours who is piloting a very interesting Gen AI tool where they are able to have a headset or an earpiece that they can talk to when they're doing maintenance and inspections, where all of that can be pure Gen AI, so all of those applications are hitting the floor so to speak [and] customers who have already done private 5G are seeing the quick ROI as a result of it. Customers who have not yet done it are being exposed to the big hole that is that lack of connectivity. The wireless edge is kind of this critical link between two intelligent layers. You have more and more AI in the end device, and you have more and more AI in edge, and you can't really make use of either of those investments without a good wireless edge. And I think private 5G is going to be a big player, if not the primary technology.
Can you give an example of an interesting private 5G use case you’re seeing from your customers?
I think one of the coolest ones is there’s a manufacturing customer who is doing very early trials of humanoid robots on the private 5G network. We see robotics of every form factor, from [automated guided vehicles] AGVs that are the simplest, all the way to these humanoid robots, so I think that's a super cool one. There are fully automated warehouses being deployed on top of private 5G networks. But equally as important, in refineries, we find the concept of the connected worker going from a tablet with a web form transformed into now a Gen AI application that these people can walk up to these machines and assets and say: "Give me the health of this machine." So, I think you have just a fascinating range of applications and things that are now starting to happen in this world. The progress rate is so dramatic.
What should solution providers know about the private cellular opportunity in 2025?
I think the number one thing is the market is taking off. Your customers are really, really interested in this, and I think it is an opportunity to ensure that you have the leadership and their ear and not losing credibility by getting too far behind this curve. We are hitting that inflection point, and I don't think a channel partner right now should miss out on this because the customers will start to go to others. Number two, I would say this is actually a great market for the first 1/3 of partners. Those [partners] have a good advantage in that first 3-5-year period when these markets happen. We saw it in the early days of Wi-Fi channel partners; the first ones to adopt it were able to add more value to their customers, and in turn, get better margins and get better monetization of that incremental investment and I think that is a clear opportunity to do that right now. And I think the third thing I would say is, if you are an existing enterprise channel partner, you are probably in the best place to make the right decisions, rather than a new partner who's coming from the telco ecosystem. That is a steeper hill to climb, because the hard part here is not understanding the private 5G technology, especially if you're going with someone like Celona that is aiming to bridge that. The hard part here is actually understanding the enterprise in-depth to understand where the need is and how to do this, and as an enterprise channel partner they have that advantage, so I would highly recommend they use it right now. I personally feel as though private 5G is going to be the fastest-growing enterprise networking segment in the next two years.
5G is complementary [to Wi-Fi] and your initial investment can be 100 percent for complementary use cases. A classic use case is in a warehouse. You have a great Wi-Fi network indoors, so don't do anything to it. Just keep using it. Your pain point might be purely outdoors, and you might just deploy this outdoors where today you're not spending anything, or, more importantly, you're doing very expensive trenching of fiber and Ethernet cables [where] you're going to spend 10x the money than you would on private 5G, or you are doing very expensive mesh Wi-Fi, and spending 5-6x of what you will spend on private 5G and not get a good network. So, you can actually redirect your existing dollars and get a lot better network. You don’t have to necessarily do rip and replace, you don't have to find new dollars. You can do this within existing budgets. And once you start deploying infrastructure, typically, you will find more use cases and applications to grow into. And I think that's the biggest thing I tell customers every time I meet them: Don’t think the barrier to entry here is a huge one. It is very doable within your budgets, more often than not.
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