Alkira launched its Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) in the Microsoft Azure marketplace today in a bid to simplify multicloud deployments. As part of the announcement, Alkira has also joined the Microsoft for Startups program, which provides select companies with technical, sales, and marketing opportunities within Azure.

Founded in 2018, Alkira CSX automates and abstracts the complexity of multicloud deployments and networking into a point-and-click service. Since emerging from stealth a year ago, the company has moved quickly to expand its offering, racking up several large customers including Koch Industries.

“We are helping these customers to accelerate Microsoft Azure adoption,” CEO Amir Khan said. “Koch has publicly spoken about what would have taken them weeks or months of planning, they were able to bring Azure into their environment with Alkira in literally minutes and hours of testing.”

CSX works by integrating with each of the public cloud providers at the API level and automating the deployment of workloads and network resources across them. Additionally, the technology can connect branch offices over the public cloud provider’s network as an alternative to MPLS circuits.

“Not only do we allow customers to migrate or adopt Azure extremely quickly, but [Microsoft] sees us as a key player in enabling the market for customers to move to the cloud much faster,” Khan said of Microsoft’s startup initiative.

Alkira’s inclusion in the Azure marketplace not only lowers the barrier to entry for existing Azure customers and provides a unified billing experience through Microsoft, but it should help to grow the company’s overall reach in the market, Khan said.

He said that CSX has potential for customers that only have workloads deployed in a single cloud, too. Many of Alkira’s customers have discovered that the networking stacks offered by cloud providers are often confusing and difficult to use resulting in a long time to resolution, Khan added.

“If a tunnel went down in [Amazing Web Services] it took them 45 minutes to an hour … to address the issues in a single cloud environment,” he said. “And with Alkira, since they’ve deployed it, all those issues have gone away. And you look at Microsoft it’s the same thing.”

And by making cloud deployments easier to deploy and manage, the company aims to significantly reduce 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. “It’s a significant savings.”

For now, Alkira’s collaboration with Microsoft is limited to inclusion in the Azure marketplace. But moving forward, Khan expects to collaborate more closely with Microsoft to better address customer’s needs.

He noted that Alkira remains cloud-agnostic and would pursue similar collaborations with other large cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud Platform should the opportunity arise.

“Microsoft has a clear strategy to target enterprise customers and [those customers] feel very comfortable working with Microsoft. We are just an enabler for all these partners, and Microsoft happens to be a key strategic partner going forward for us,” Khan said. “Having said that, we’re working with multiple different partners to make sure that we provide a multicloud environment which is beneficial to the end customer.”

Editors note: an earlier version of this story erroneously referred to Alkira's CSX platform as a multicloud orchestrator. We regret the error.