Celona says: "Hello, World!"

This article was first published on September 18th 2019 via LinkedIn.

It is a big day for the young Celona family as we share our gratitude and excitement at embarking on this journey with an incredible group of investors: Matt Howard from Norwest Venture Partners, Arif Janmohamed from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Shirish Sathaye from Cervin Ventures. As the cliche goes, we are all a product of our own experiences, and my vision for Celona has clearly been shaped by past experiences and observations in my professional life.

During my 12+ year journey with Aruba, I saw enterprise Wi-Fi access go from “good to have” to “can’t live without” status. Looking back, Wi-Fi was disruptive because it fundamentally changed the definition of what an enterprise access network should do and how it should be designed. While wired networks were singularly focused on improving speeds, Wi-Fi enabled employees, visitors, students and patients across all industries to stay connected while on the move.

Along the way, my excitement for the underlying technology evolved to an appreciation of the transformational new experiences enabled by the combination of enterprise mobility and cloud-based applications. I believe that we are at the cusp of another revolution in the enterprise, demanding a fresh new look at the networking infrastructure.

AI-powered apps use “life as the input” using video, voice and environmental sensing and will transform business intelligence and operations.

These business-critical apps that are part of the latest generation of digital transformation projects demand always-on connectivity and guaranteed service levels - often in some of the toughest environments (e.g. logistics warehouse, manufacturing facility) for a wireless network. These apps need more than just capacity - they require an underlying enterprise network that can deliver ultra-low latency communications and five-9s of reliability, often at locations within enterprise facilities where people and workers may not even go. It is clear to me that the new experiences promised by AI-powered apps demand wireless connectivity that does not skip a beat.

The advent of new spectrum models - especially the shared Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum - has removed one of the most important obstacles for the adoption of cellular wireless in the enterprise.

At Celona, we believe that enterprise cellular wireless (LTE today and in the near future 5G) opens the door for these new experiences for devices and users. Engineering specifications for LTE/5G wireless inherently provide the necessary tools to enable a guaranteed service level for business-critical apps. Our job at Celona is to create an end-to-end solution that makes the cellular network backbone affordable for and accessible by enterprise IT.

As I share this vision with prospective customers and solution partners for Celona, I am energized by the genuine excitement about this new chapter in enterprise wireless networking. Enterprises are already starting to view Celona as the bridge to 5G and their next generation of apps, and we are looking forward to partnering with them along the way.

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Join us by signing up to our product trial program. And you can also always find us at hello@celona.io.