Alkira announced an expanded relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a bid to simplify multicloud deployments. As part of the announcement, the startup also joined Amazon’s ISV Accelerate and Global Startup programs.

“The cloud providers are starting to realize that we accelerate the adoption of the cloud significantly because the network piece was the hindrance,” Alkira CEO Amir Khan said. “Nobody wants to be isolated from a customer using one cloud. They all know now that it's a multicloud environment, so they want to win each other's customers.”

Alkira’s Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) allows the public cloud providers to do just that by eliminating barriers to entry for adopting another cloud provider, he added.

Amir, who was formerly CEO of Viptela, founded Alkira with his brother Atif in 2018. The company emerged from stealth mode in early 2020 to launch the CSX platform, which automates and abstracts the complexity of deploying, managing, and networking multicloud workloads into a point-and-click service.

The platform integrates with all of the major public cloud providers at the API level and handles resource deployment and configuration. In addition to cloud-to-cloud networking, the service also supports inter-branch office connectivity over the public cloud providers’ private networks as an alternative to MPLS circuits.

Today’s announcement builds on Alkira’s existing integration with AWS Transit Gateway Connect, which enables improved connectivity for SD-WAN and other environments to AWS. The vendor's inclusion in the AWS marketplace further simplifies deployments and billing for existing customers looking to take advantage of cloud services from Azure or Google Cloud, Khan explained.

And as an ISV Accelerate member, Amazon’s sales teams are now bringing customers to Alkira, who they believe can benefit from the platform. “It just helps them easily onboard customers, and that's exciting for them,” Khan said.

Meanwhile, for the customer, Alkira sees an opportunity to reduce the operational overhead and ultimately the cost of ownership for deploying and maintaining workloads in the cloud.

“The reduction in complexity and standardization across all these environments ends up reducing the overall footprint … in addition to cutting down the costs of hiring more people and the learning curve,” Khan said, in an earlier interview. “It’s a significant savings.”

The partnership comes on the heels of a similar collaboration with Microsoft Azure, which saw Alkira extend CSX to the cloud provider’s marketplace. Alkira also joined the Microsoft for Startups program, which provides companies with technical, sales, and marketing opportunities within its public cloud offering.

The CSX platform has garnered significant industry support from public cloud providers and enterprises.

Koch Industries is among the software vendor’s largest customers with more than 700 locations across 70 countries. In March, the industrial giant said it’d deployed Alkria’s CSX platform alongside Palo Alto Networks VM-series virtual firewalls to secure its multicloud branch traffic.