When Alkira Inc. emerged from stealth mode in April 2020, the startup company’s premise was to make multicloud networking one-click simple. They didn’t label it as such at the time, but Alkira’s founders have come to recognize that their model was built on the foundation of a supercloud.

“People are tired of doing individual things in individual clouds and on-premises locations,” said Amir Khan (pictured, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of Alkira. “Why not take the raw capabilities of the cloud and build a network cloud or supercloud on top of these clouds to optimize the whole infrastructure and seamlessly connect it into the on-premises and remote user locations? You bring it all together to solve networking problems, thereby creating a supercloud which is an abstraction layer that hides all the complexity of the underlying clouds from the customer.”

Amir Khan spoke with theCUBE industry analyst John Furrier at today’s Supercloud2 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Atif Khan (pictured, right), co-founder and chief technology officer of Alkira, and they discussed the company’s vision for creating a multicloud-capable network. (* Disclosure below.)

Reducing cloud complexity

Alkira’s two co-founders previously teamed up to launch Viptela Inc., which became a player in the multibillion-dollar SD-WAN market and was ultimately acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. in 2017. Viptela leveraged SD-WAN technology for cloud connectivity, and the founders realized that customers could benefit from a common infrastructure.

“We came up with an architecture we started calling Cloud OnRamps, where we built a transit VPC and put virtual instances of SD-WAN appliances from there into the cloud,” Atif Khan said. “It started becoming very complicated for customers because it wasn’t just connectivity; it required other use cases. One of our customers called it a spaghetti mess.”

To untangle the spaghetti, Alkira addressed the complex task of connecting companies to cloud providers and cloud providers to each other. The vision was to create a multicloud-capable network that behaves like the cloud and can be accessed as a service.

“What enterprises are looking for is agility,” said Atif Khan. “To achieve that agility, they are moving services and use cases into the cloud. You need an infrastructure-like supercloud which is sitting inside the cloud and is able to handle those use cases.”

Part of the multicloud tangle involves a trend known as “shadow IT,” where it has become relatively easy for one software engineer to independently spin up a cloud instance and deploy applications separate from the corporate compute environment.

“Shadow IT was the biggest problem in the enterprise environment,” said Amir Khan. “Individuals or small groups of people spun up instances in the cloud. It was completely disconnected from the on-prem environment or the existing IT environment that the customer had. How do you bring it together? That’s what we’re trying to solve for.”

Cloud adoption in days

There are signs that Alkira’s message around multicloud simplicity is gaining enterprise traction. Koch Industries deploys Alkira for cloud networking, and the Warner Music Group leverages the firm’s technology to speed up the integration of new businesses through mergers and acquisitions.

“Their whole network infrastructure is running on the Alkira infrastructure,” Amir Khan said. “They’re able to adopt new clouds within days rather than waiting for months to architect and then deploy and figure out how to manage it.”

When major customers such as Koch or Warner experience growth, the IT infrastructure needs to scale to accommodate that expansion. Alkira’s founders make the point that the company’s supercloud model allows it to build in autoscaling features that can grow with the businesses of its customers.

“A supercloud or a network cloud is a cloud in the middle or a network in the middle which provides connectivity from any endpoint to any endpoint,” Atif Khan said. “Why can’t the network now autoscale also just like your other services? We can keep building and scaling the platform horizontally.”

Alkira’s supercloud success offers a hint that changes may be coming to the networking space. The days of building bigger and bigger routers and then interconnecting them may be numbered.

“If companies in the networking space do not adopt this new concept or new way of doing things, I think some of them will become extinct over time,” Amir Khan said. “Slowly data centers go away, the network becomes a plumbing thing, very simple to deploy. And everything on top of that is virtualized in a cloudlike manner. It needs to be a very intelligent infrastructure going forward.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Supercloud2:

(* Disclosure: Alkira Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Alkira nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE