Atif Khan is a renowned routing expert with extensive experience bringing ground-breaking networking solutions to market and architecting the world’s largest and most sophisticated global networks. As CTO and co-founder, Atif is responsible for Alkira’s technology vision and overall engineering and product development.

Prior to Alkira, Atif was a VP Technology and Solutions, and a founding member at Viptela, the SD-WAN pioneer acquired by Cisco in 2017. Atif received a BS in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and he holds 7 patents in routing, security and overlay multicast.

What made you decide to start Alkira?

The AI and cloud era demands a unified, flexible approach to networking. We reimagined the network as a true as-a-service service—global, elastic, and AI-ready. Alkira delivers fully managed network infrastructure with security, visibility, and governance built in, so enterprises can scale and adapt as fast as their AI strategy evolves.

My team and I have spent decades building large-scale networks and pioneering cloud networking technologies like SD-WAN. The throughline: abstract complexity, automate operations, and make networking as easy to consume as any other cloud resource. Alkira applies those lessons in a clean-sheet, natively cloud-delivered design—entirely hardware-free.

What we have built is on-demand network infrastructure that can instantly connect AI data centers, clouds, remote users, and edge sites with secure connectivity to AI workloads, all from a single interface. Our Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) behaves like the cloud itself—elastic and instantly available—so customers can provision or decommission in minutes, not months. Advanced network and security services—NAT, DNS/DHCP/IPAM, and integrated third-party controls—are one click away, making insertion and policy management simple and consistent everywhere.

How does Alkira’s approach to networking differ from traditional networking solutions, and what new use cases does it enable?

Alkira takes a different path from traditional networking: it’s purpose-built for the AI and cloud era, but flexible enough to adapt for any era of networking. SD-WAN was a step forward for WAN connectivity. We took that a bit further and abstracted the entire network, delivering it as a cloud service—no appliances, no box-by-box configs. The result is global connectivity across clouds, AI data centers, and remote sites without a costly re-architecture.

Alkira unlocks new use cases: connect and secure workloads across sites, clouds, and users in minutes, with predictable performance, plus built-in segmentation and governance—all from a single interface. Rapidly onboard regions, insert third-party security, and use real-time analytics for proactive operations. In short: move at cloud speed, adapt to changing needs, and simplify day-to-day networking in ways SD-WAN wasn’t designed to support.

From day one, we set out to build something fundamentally different. That decision shows up in customer loyalty and expansion: when the network is this simple and elastic, teams quickly extend Alkira to more use cases—and tell us they can’t imagine going back.

How has Alkira grown since launching?

Since our 2018 founding, Alkira’s revenue has grown more than fifty fold and our team has more than doubled. We now count a double-digit roster of Fortune 500 companies—each investing over $1 million annually and growing—as customers. That momentum reflects a clear market shift toward cloud-native, consumption-based networking.

Why are customers moving from legacy networking to Alkira?

Global enterprises are realizing that the AI and cloud era requires a fundamentally new model. Alkira lets them extend current investments into any public cloud while eliminating operational drag. The result is faster time-to-value, integrated security, and end-to-end visibility—all without the headaches of hardware refreshes or multi-vendor complexity and as-a-service.

What are the most important lessons that have influenced Alkira’s product philosophy and go-to-market strategy?

There are three important lessons that have fundamentally shaped Alkira’s product philosophy and go-to-market strategy. First is the critical importance of keeping everything simple for the customer and being customer-centric in every decision we make. At previous companies, as we continued to add more features, usability sometimes suffered, making the product harder to operate and manage. With Alkira, we made simplicity a core tenet—our goal is to deliver powerful networking capabilities without overwhelming users, ensuring that even complex environments can be managed through a single, intuitive interface.

The second lesson is to make the network consumable. The industry is moving to as-a-service and networking shouldn’t be the exception. With Alkira, enterprises provision a global, secure network on demand, insert security and network services in-fabric, and see everything end-to-end—without standing up hardware or stitching vendors together.

The third key lesson is the value of failing fast. In the fast-moving world of cloud and networking, it’s essential to quickly test ideas, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and iterate rapidly. This approach allows us to stay agile, respond to customer needs, and innovate continuously without getting bogged down by over-engineering or analysis paralysis. By embracing these lessons, Alkira has been able to deliver a platform that not only addresses the challenges of today’s enterprises but also evolves quickly to meet the needs of tomorrow’s enterprises.

Looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest opportunities or challenges for Alkira in the evolving enterprise networking landscape?

I see tremendous opportunities for Alkira as enterprise networking continues to evolve at a rapid pace. The shift toward AI-centric architecture is accelerating, and organizations are demanding networking solutions that are agile, scalable, and robust enough to adapt to any demands. Our ability to deliver a unified, cloud-native networking infrastructure as a service positions us well to meet these needs, especially as more businesses seek to simplify operations, accelerate digital transformation, and support complex environments.

A major opportunity for us is the growing demand for AI-ready networking, where enterprises want to seamlessly connect users, applications, and data across any environment, with robust security and end-to-end visibility. With the rise of AI, enterprises are finding that their traditional networks simply aren’t built to handle the demands of large-scale AI workloads. What should be a lightning-fast transformation is instead bogged down by costly, time-consuming network redesigns and many businesses are discovering that deploying AI can take months, instead of weeks or less. We call this problem “Slow AI.” Alkira is working with some of the world’s largest enterprises to modernize their networks in ways that make AI adoption frictionless instead of frustrating.

At the same time, there are challenges on the horizon. As the complexity of enterprise environments increases, we must continue to innovate rapidly while keeping our solutions simple and intuitive for customers to adopt and manage. The competitive landscape is also evolving, with new entrants and shifting customer expectations. Maintaining our pace of innovation, scaling our partner ecosystem, and ensuring we deliver measurable value to customers will be critical. Overall, I’m excited about Alkira’s role in redefining what’s possible in enterprise networking, and I believe we’re just getting started. We have some compelling announcements in the pipeline, which will further simplify the networking experience for enterprises and address the incredible demand we’re seeing in the market. The best is yet to come.

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