Alkira has announced significant existing and new customer growth. New customers include Michaels and Warner Hotels. Meanwhile, existing customers SITA, Chart Industries and Koch Industries have extended their partnerships with Alkira.
The company cites a recent Gartner report that states, “WAN transport and network equipment alone account for 66% of network budgets, highlighting the critical need for cost-efficient solutions.”
That is good news for Alkira. It has invested heavily in its Networking Infrastructure-as-a-Service (NIaaS) solutions. Last year, it raised $100m in a Series C funding round. That has allowed it to expand its networking solutions to address that need for cost-efficient solutions. With budgets under constant pressure, any savings are important.
Amir Khan, CEO of Alkira, said, “Our customer successes across diverse sectors demonstrate the agility, scalability, and tremendous impact of Alkira’s Network Infrastructure as a Service platform. By simplifying complex network infrastructure and accelerating cloud adoption, we empower enterprises to innovate faster and operate more securely. This is especially valuable amid unprecedented global change.
“Whether driven by geopolitical forces or rapid AI adoption, today’s enterprise networks must be more flexible, scalable, secure, and cost-effective – and Alkira offers the simplest path to achieve this.”
Where is Alkira delivering benefits?
In January, Enterprise Times talked with both Amir and Atif Khan about Alkira. They talked about many of the WAN challenges and how they were removing those from customers. Among those challenges was how to deal with the inefficiencies in network strategies.
That was corroborated by the recent Nemertes REV Report on Alkira. It states that it enables customers to reduce cloud integration time by 96%. It also allows them to connect data centres 93% faster and cut cloud management efforts by 84%.
That ability to integrate cloud integration and connect to data centres faster is something that all the customers in this release talk about. For Michaels, it was about scaling their network to handle four times its normal traffic volume. SITA also gained from optimising its cloud infrastructure to support its critical aviation operations worldwide.
Resiliency is another key topic that customers call out, and one that is high on the corporate agenda. New laws and regulations worldwide are making resiliency a compliance requirement. Part of that resilience is the ability to move data to alternative locations. A more efficient network infrastructure is key to that. For Warner Hotels, that gave them better operational efficiency across the UK. Michaels and Chart Industries also highlighted resiliency in the benefits they gained.
No mention of AI
Perhaps the biggest surprise in this announcement is the lack of mention of AI. The volume of data that AI uses and the network traffic it creates require that networks be more efficient. Additionally, to reduce the power and operational cost of AI, many companies will need to rethink their network infrastructure.
This is where Khan believes Alkira can play a significant part. He told Enterprise Times that in the short term, its ability to scale networks and connect to data centres faster will ease AI adoption. That will allow customers to rethink their network infrastructure design to cope with increased workload. Alkira is delivering the modelling tools to allow its customers to do the design and planning. It is also designing its network for greater scalability to deal with demand.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Network capacity and flexibility have always been a challenge. As organisations become increasingly dependent on the cloud and newer technologies like AI, it will continue to be a pain point. Additionally, new compliance demands for resiliency place further burden on already constrained and congested networks.
For Alkira, this is an opportunity. It see’s ability to bring Network-as-a-Service and Multi-Cloud Networking into a new Networking Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution as the answer. It is already attracting large clients with complex environments, and they are reporting gains from adopting Alkira’s solutions. More importantly, its existing customers are continuing to increase their spend,
Investors are also seeing this as a bet worth making. The $100 million Series C investment from last year is unlikely to be the last. As demand grows, Alkira will want to be ahead of that, and that means investing in growing its own products.
