- Celona's CEO said that Celona's recent restructuring was a response to onshoring trends
- He noted that physical AI trends are happening on the factory floor
- Shah said that, aside from the U.S, the Middle East is Celona's biggest market
Celona's CEO told Fierce this week that a combination of geo-politically focused domestic production projects and the rise of "true autonomous mobile robots" is having an affect on the development of the private network market now.
Onshoring driving changes
"Onshoring is driving a lot of investment," in the U.S. Rajeev Shah, CEO and co-founder said. He noted, however, that although the U.S. is making the biggest investments in such projects, there are also similar schemes happening in India and Saudi Arabia right now, as well as other countries.
The investment in onshoring, plus the deployment shift from brownfield to greenfield, drove the company to restructure in the middle of October by cutting 20% of its workforce, mainly in sales and marketing roles in the U.S. and Europe. Cuts also hit the company’s R&D and administrative departments. "... It was really in response to looking at those trends and saying this is potentially going to be a bigger market that is going to take off in a greenfield fashion in these concentrated markets," Shah said. He stated that these new projects that are not limited by pre-existing structures are taking off rather than the "slower, gradual, global thing" that was happening before.
Physical AI
Of course, no conversation happens these days without mention of AI, as the CEO noted. This is very true in the industries he is talking to, where physical AI is already coming about. "We are seeing at a ground level how real that is," Shah said.
We are going to move from autonomous guided vehicles to true autonomous mobile robots, he said. "There are humanoid robots coming," he stated.
This physical AI will require private 5G — rather than Wi-Fi connections — to operate. As Fierce has seen before, latency is a particular concern for Wi-Fi networks, especially when dealing with objects like autonomous robots where you can’t have these vehicles stalling or jittering around in the middle of a task.
A digital oasis?
Shah was also keen to talk up his company's new "Digital Oases" project with Armada. This combines Armada's modular data centers with Celona's private 5G stack, he said.
Armada's data centers are providing compute for "edge AI applications in remote locations" while the private network will then extend that application and services to users and devices and route that data coming back.
"So a classic case you would imagine as a remote drilling site where they want to create a network rather quickly," Shah said. "They want local compute because the WAN link is unreliable, or in some cases not even present."
Aside from the U.S., Shah notes that the Middle East is Celona's biggest market. He said that Latin America follows the Middle East.