Celona reacts to the growing maturity of its channel by moving from a single-tier organization to a more diverse three tiered one, while complementing the channel announcement with new Aerloc security improvements for industrial IoT.

Today, Celona, which is focused on 5G connectivity as part of an IT/OT solution for the enterprise, is announcing its new Frequency Partner Program. While Celona has had a partner program since 2002, the original one was a single tier program. Now, with over 150 partners in the program, they have changed it to a three-tier program that is designed to enable partners to better differentiate themselves. At the same time, Celona is also introducing their new Aerloc security enhancements that are well suited for Industrial IoT systems.

Celona, which was founded in Munich in 2011, and is now headquartered in Silicon Valley, competes with vendors like Ericcson and Nokia but sees itself as fundamentally different from them.

“Ericcson and Nokia were built to serve service providers, and their entire solutions are designed for that scale of provider,” said Rob Mustarde, SVP of Worldwide Sales at Celona, who runs the whole sales organization which includes the channel. “Their products weren’t really designed for broader use in the enterprise. While they will still work there, they really aren’t the right thing to do for enterprises. We are the only company that makes all the pieces to deploy in their enterprise, which are designed specifically for that market. All the software is ours as well.”

The 150 partners bring in the overwhelming majority of Celona’s business.

“Now, 99% of our business goes through the channel,” Mustarde said. “80% of our business is Fortune 1000. We need to use partners to scale.”

The original partner program, which was created in 2022, was a single-tier one.

“What we are trying to do now with this tiered program is give an partners opportunity to differentiate themselves,” Mustarde indicated.

Frequency Partner is the standard partner level, rather than an introductory tier. Frequency partners get access to all the available enablement resources.

“Preferred Frequency partners, the second tier, are SIs and VARs who have demonstrated wireless skills, and who have a record of delivering wireless solutions successfully,” Mustarde added. They also receive additional channel sales, engineering and marketing resources.

“Global partners are the top tier, and have a global reach,” Mustarde said. “Technically all partners have a global reach because of our worldwide distribution, but these partners have it on their own.” They receive additional resources.

“All tiers of partners have access to co-op funds, MDF, and rebates, with the difference depending on the tier,” he added.

Training has been expanded with a formal new program.

“What was missing until a few months ago was a formal in-depth training program,” Mustarde said. “We provided training before but it was done by a local engineer, so it was not consistent.” New formal sales and technical certification programs have been added as well, such as Managed Service Provider and Security certifications.

Celona also sees the Frequency Partner Program as part of a broader 5G LAN community

“It includes partners, customers and technology partners like Apple,” Mustarde stated. “We have also added partner and customer advisory councils with biannual meetings for direct feedback.”

TDSYNNEX will provide worldwide distribution to partners.

“We have had a relationship with them for a year and a half, and it is now gathering speed internationally,” Mustarde said. “Partners will now have access to a mature global market.”

In addition to their channel news, Celona also announced the release of Aerloc, a new suite of security capabilities that provides an enhanced level of private 5G wireless network security. It is specifically designed to address the unique challenges of securing increasingly digitized industrial IT and OT systems with new capabilities like extended SIM-based authentication for unified zero trust enforcement, dynamic and distributed policy enforcement, and air-gapping between IT and OT traffic running on a common private 5G network, enabled by Celona MicroSlicing.

“The private network side of our business is very OT-centric and always has been,” said Puneet Shetty, Celona’s VP of Product Management. “I would say 90 plus per cent is OT. We are working on a new capability for neutral hosts, which is more of an IT type solution, and which is presently U.S.-centric, since it involves working with specific carriers, which are based in the U.S.”

“We have always treated the security side on OT very seriously,” Mustarde said. The key advance with Aerloc is the way in which it unifies IT, OT and Private 5G into a seamless solution that lets operational and security data be immediately analyzed and acted on.

Aerloc’s new features include SIM-based Authentication with Unified Zero Trust Enforcement for IT and OT devices. This eliminates the need for device-side software or agents and also uses Celonis’ open API framework to integrate with other leading enterprise security solutions, including Palo Alto Networks Cortex XSOAR and NGFW, Cisco ISE, and Aruba ClearPass.

Aerloc also provides dynamic and distributed policy enforcement to integrate with posture assessment tools, IoT security solutions, and security orchestration automation platforms. This results in a collaborative security architecture enabling localized and responsive security policy enforcement at a granular level, down to the individual device or user, and at the very edge of the network to significantly reduce the attack surface.

Finally, Aerloc enables an air gap between IT and OT Traffic using Celona MicroSlicing technology, in which IT and OT traffic can be securely segmented both physically and logically over the air, on the LAN and within the shared 5G LAN network. This segmentation of IT and OT traffic ensures the separation of critical operational data from general enterprise traffic to maintain security and performance integrity across both environments.