(gentle music) >> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And this is a special CUBE conversation. We've been talking a lot, of course for many years about the ascendancy of cloud. And today in 2020, multicloud is a big piece of the discussion. And we're really happy to help unveil coming out of stealth Alkira, which is helping the networking challenges when it comes to multicloud and I have the two co-founders, they are brothers. I have Amir, who is the CEO and Atif, who is the CTO, the Khan brothers, thank you so much for joining us, and congratulation on the launch of the company. >> Thank you Stu for having us on the Show. It's a pleasure to see you again. >> All right, so Amir, we've had you on the program. Your previous company that you've done was of course Viptela, the two of you have worked together at, I believe, five companies, a successful companies. Acquired the most recent one into Cisco. So, Amir, obviously, strong networking team, your brother, the CTO is going to talk to us about the engineering but give us just the story of Alkira, what you've been building and now ready to unveil to the world. >> Certainly, Stu, so when around 2018 timeframe, we started looking into the next big problem to solve in the industry, which was not only a substantial from the market size perspective, but also from the customers perspective was solving a major pain point. So when we started looking into the cloud customers and started talking to our customers, they were struggling from the cloud networking perspective, even in a single cloud, and it was a new environment for them and they had to understand all the nitty gritty details of each one of these clouds and when you go to multicloud environment, it becomes exponentially complicated to address not only connectivity, but how to deploy services like firewall and other services, including load balancers and IP address management, et cetera, and remote access. So we started digging deeper into this problem and started working with the customers and took a clean sheet of paper and came up with a very comprehensive approach to offering a solution which is as-a Service. This time, we are not shipping any hardware software it is just like any other SaaS application, you just come to our portal just drag and drop, literally draw out your network and click on provision. And come back after 40 minutes or so your whole global cloud infrastructure is up and running. >> All right, Atif your brother laid out a pretty broad vision there, any of us from the networking world, we know there's a lot of complexity there. And therefore it takes a lot of work, when I want to do things simply, as-a Service is a huge growth area bring us inside the engineering challenges that you and the team have been working on to build this solution. >> Certainly, Stu, so we've been working both Amir and myself in the networking industry for more than 25 years now. And the way we have worked and what we have believed in is that we need to solve customer problems. We never believe in doing a science project. So here also we started working with customers as we have always done in the past. We understood the customers pain points, the challenges they were facing, especially in this case and in cloud networking space, multicloud networking space, based on the user requirements, users, or the customers use cases, we started building our service. And here what we have built as a complete network as-a Service. It's a multicloud network as-a service, which not only provides connectivity to multiple clouds, but also addresses the needs for bringing in networking services, as well as security services, making sure that you have a full policy based infrastructure on top of it, you have deep visibility into the clouds as well as into on-premise end to end visibility, end to end monitoring, troubleshooting. And all of it is delivered to you as-a service. So that's what we have been doing here at Alkira. >> Excellent! So when we've looked at multicloud, of course, every cloud, they have some similar things, they have some different things. They all tend to do things a little bit differently. One of the secret sauces that have been talked about for the last few years is the SD-WAN space, like you had built with the tele to help really enable those environments. So Atif we've got a diagram here, which I think will help explain a little bit as to where out here and how it plugs into these different environments, walk us through a little bit what we're seeing here, and what you're actually doing at Alkira. >> So here we are building a global unified, multicloud network. It's consumed as a service. Think of it as consuming it just like you would consume any other SaaS, like our SaaS application. So you come to Alkira's portal, you register. And then there you go, and you start building your global multicloud unified network with integrated services. So here what you see is a Alkira's cloud services exchange which comprises of the cloud exchange points. You can bring these up these cloud exchange points up anywhere on the globe. You can decide like what networking services security services you need in these cloud exchange points, you can connect to multiple clouds. From there, you can bring your existing on-prem connectivity into the CXPs. All these CXPs have a full mesh of overlay, high speed, low latency connectivity among each other. So there is a full network which comes up between these CXPs. And the whole infrastructure scales with customers as our customers scale. So it's a horizontally scalable, very highly redundant and resilient infrastructure, which we had built. >> All right, so, Amir now that we understand the basics of the technology, you've got some strong investors including Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, give us what is being announced that you're coming out of stealth, where are you with the product? How many employees you have? And where are you with the discussion of customer adoption. >> So Stu we are obviously, bringing this to the market, and we will be announcing it on April 15. It's available for the customers to consume our solution as a service on that day. So they are welcome to reach out to us and we'll be happy to help them. And as a matter of fact, just come to our website and register for the service. And yeah, I mean you rightly said that we have a superstar team of not only the venture capital companies, but also the board members representing those companies, the Bill Coffin and Mamun Ahmed, who the leading VCs are on the board of our company, including myself and Atif. >> All right, Amir I'd love to actually bring up the second slide that we have here. Walk us through you said the service, how do people get started? How do they understand, walk us through what they do. >> So the biggest challenge when we started looking into these problems, Stu was that it was very complicated. You had to piecemeal bring up instances in the cloud and stitch them together. And when you try to integrate the services, that was a different challenge for the customers. So we want to make sure that it was so simple and clean, that the customer didn't even have to think about any underlying construct on any of the clouds, they should not have to worry about learning each individual part from the networking perspective. So here's your portal, you just come, step one is come to our portal register. Step two is you start drawing your network based on your intent, what on-prem connectivity you want to bring into this service, what type of services you need, like a lot of firewalls and then what pilots you need to connect and everything happens seamlessly, from on-prem, prem through services into the cloud, across multiple clouds. It's a seamless service that we have created and with full analytics capabilities and full governance built in. >> All right, so Atif bring us into what this means for customers, how do they manage it? Is this the networking team? Is it the cloud architects? What API's are there? How does this fit into kind of what customers are doing today? And solve some of those challenges that we laid out earlier in the discussion. >> Yes, from the customer's perspective, as I said, it's completely delivered as a service. Customers come to our portal, they draw out the network, they select the services, they click on provision and the whole network comes up within minutes. So the main thing here is that from a customer's point of view, if they are connecting to different clouds, they don't need to understand any of the underlying specifics or underlying constructs of any of the cloud in order to bring up connectivity. So what we are doing here is we are abstracting the cloud chair. So we are building a virtual cloud network. So if you think of, if you compare with what we did in the previous life, we virtualized the WAN. So here what we are doing is we are virtualizing the cloud network, so underlying doesn't matter which cloud you sit on which cloud you need to connect to, which networking services, whether a cloud native services or whether you want to consume Alkira services, or we also support like customer bringing in third party services as well. So it's all offered from our platform all offered is service to the customer. Again, no expertise required in any of the underlying networking constructs of any of these clouds. >> Give us what we should be looking at from a technology roadmap from Alkira, through the rest of 2020. >> Good question, Stu. So as I mentioned earlier, our roadmap is dictated by customer requirements, so we prioritize what customers need from us. So we have come out with a scalable platform, we have come out with a marketplace for networking services in there. In the near term, we'll be expanding our marketplace with more services. We will be addressing more use cases and when I talk about use cases, I can give you some examples. Like there's, you not just only need connectivity into cloud, you might have different requirements from throughput perspective or bandwidth perspective or different services that you need to contend your cloud when you may have certain applications such as Internet facing application where you need like traffic coming in from the internet, inbound to those applications, you might need services like a load balancer, like an external load balancer in our services exchange. You might also need like a firewall, you might need traffic engineering, or sorry, service chaining capabilities where you chain service through multiple traffic through multiple of these services like a firewall and a load balancer. So we built a platform which gives you all those capabilities going forward, we will be adding more services more use cases to it. We have a long ways ahead of us and we will be putting a lot of effort in delivering a roadmap as we go. >> All right, so Amir your technical team definitely has their hands full and robust roadmap to work on. Give us the high level, what we should be looking for Alkira, for people that are out there, multicloud and networking tends to get talked a lot. There's many big companies and small ones. What will separate Alkira from the rest of the market today? And what should we be looking to see the company's progression through 2020? >> Yeah, thanks for asking that. Yeah, certainly. I mean, from the solution perspective, Atif said that it's so fundamentally important to have a very strong basis. And that's what we have done. We are bringing out a certain number of services and now we will continue to grow on that we'll create a big marketplace. We will continue to improve on which clouds we connect to and how and we will building our own services in certain cases as well. Now, building a technology is just one piece of it, we have to go out to market with a company that the customers can trust every single department in that company, whether it's sales or how they do business with us all the business back end pieces, after we sorted out and that's what we've been working with. And then go to market partners, that is very, very important, support is very important. So let me spend a little bit of time on go to market strategy. We have been working with the service providers so that we can extend our reach not only to the large customers, but also to mid-size customers across the globe. So you will see us in the future announcing major service provider, partnerships, as well as we've been working with large SIS, WAAS and system integration partners. And also we have taking a slightly different approach this time because it's a service. So we are going with telecom master agents, which have been working with the service providers, the cloud providers, the cable providers, as a channel, and they have a huge reach into the customer base. So we have a very comprehensive strategy not only from the go to market perspective and the technology perspective, but also how we are going to support our customers and continue to build our relationship to build a lasting company. >> Yeah, Amir super important point there. Absolutely, we've seen the maturation and change in the service providers, as today they are working with many of the public cloud providers and they're, as you said, the close touch point and a trusted partner for customers. All right, so before I let you go, you two are brothers, everybody in today's day and age is spending even more time with family but your situation you've worked together for a long time. What keeps bringing the two of you together, working together and talk about that bond? >> So I mean we're a very close knit family, we have four brothers and one sister, and obviously Atif and I have been the closest because we have been working together for the longest, we've at least work in five different companies together, our families traveled together, we have three daughters each, we live about five minutes, walk from each other. And we just have this bond where we not only have the family close, but also very close knit friends circle, which we both hang out with, and we obviously have common interests in the sports as well. We play squash and tennis and workout. So Atif if you want to take a stab at that also. >> Yeah, so we've always been very close. In fact, we've been together for the last like, ever since I can remember like even college days, we were roommates for some time also, we have our circle of friends, is the same old source. So, again, we are very close. And we worked well together so we complement each other's skills. And it's worked out in the past. Hopefully it will work out again. And I look forward to working with them for many, many more years to come. >> Amir and Atif thank you so much for sharing the coming out of stealth. After all, Alkira we definitely look forward to watching your progress and seeing how you're helping customers in this multicloud world. Thank you for joining us. >> Stu thank you so much. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you so much for watching this special CUBE conversation on theCUBE. (gentle music)