Koch Industries Embraces Networking as a Service Delivered Via Alkira

Koch Industries, Inc., an American multinational corporation, has joined a growing list of organizations and enterprises where the IT organization is evolving to become a general manager of IT that is consumed as a service rather than being built on platforms that are maintained by an internal IT team. With this shift, even Koch Industries, which encompasses cloud platforms and network services, is starting to rely on interconnect.

Rather than securing, deploying, and maintaining routers and firewalls to deliver enterprise-class networking services, the company is becoming economically efficient to consume networking services like any other cloud service. Akira, a provider of wide-area network (WAN) service to Koch Industries, has constructed Alkira Cloud Services Exchange (CSX) using $76 million it raised from Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) to aggregate multiple points-of-presence provisioned through a console that Alkira customers access as a cloud service.

The decision made by Koch Industries to employ the Alkira networking service is part of a more extensive series of initiatives. The Alkira approach eliminates the need to acquire networking infrastructure and hire specialists to maintain it. Koch Industries is now primarily focusing on its internal resources on building applications that make a strategic difference in the networking sector. The company aims to elevate the role of an internal IT organization.