The 12-year-old cloud-based wireless specialist AirTight Networks is undergoing one of its biggest transformations ever as it reorganizes its executive team and focuses on the channel like never before.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced this week that it had hired its first ever channel chief, Kester Kyrie, a former Aruba Networks sales leader, as well as a new CEO, Rick Wilmer, who was previously CEO at Leyden Energy and held roles as vice president of operations at Aruba and Seagate.

"Becoming CEO, I'm on a mission and my No. 1 priority is growth," said Wilmer, in an interview with CRN. "We're going to get a lot more customers, a lot more channel partners and a lot more revenue."

Wilmer said his security-focused wireless solutions are used by the strictest government agencies with plans to grow the company to be a market leader and 100 percent channel.

IT Best of Breed spoke to Wilmer about his vision, refocused channel effort and strategy for winning against Cisco and Aerohive.

What Differentiates AirTight In The Market?

Our legacy is a wireless security company and we are widely recognizes as having the best Wi-Fi security, period. We're a pure cloud-based Wi-Fi company and we've also have this sensational commitment to making Wi-Fi simple for a business to deploy while at the same time making no compromises on wireless security.

We sell a lot of security only solutions to the federal government, defense and spy agencies. We've got a who's-who list of the most security-centric organizations on the planet as our customers. So we've taken that legacy of our security, we've done it purely cloud-based and made it incredibility simple to deploy.

What's Your Strategy For Competing Against Cisco Meraki and Aerohive?

For a smaller company like AirTight, to compete with the big guys we're going to have to do something to get the channel's attention and that's going to be a combination of providing good, high-quality leads so they can go out and close customers, as well as providing them with a lot of support whether through MDF, training, technical resources, more incentives, increased margins -- we're very committed to do that.

Has AirTight ever been so focused on the channel?

This is our biggest channel push ever.

Our channel strategy is really centered around trying to bring in some top distributors aligned with what we sell and have them help us recruit a big ecosystem of resellers underneath them to really give us a strong sales footprint in the market, then we'll supplement that with significant investment with our channel account management organization. We're going to be adding people in that organization to help support our channel partners along with a fairly lightweight, very senior level outside sales force to support the channel.

Our inside sales group will almost exclusively become a channel support organization. Our real goal is to turn them into people that can field inbound inquiries to Airtight, then process this over to the appropriate channel partner.