Lumen puts its total addressable market at approximately $70 billion once Alkira’s international and cloud-to-cloud coverage is included.
“Alkira is a bull’s eye in terms of strategic alignment and value creation,” Johnson said. “For Lumen, we expect it to dramatically accelerate our road map execution from years to months.”
How the architecture works
Alkira operates as a cloud-native, carrier-agnostic control plane. Rather than relying on physical hardware at each interconnection point, it uses a virtual port model that lets enterprises design, deploy and manage network connectivity across clouds, data centers and on-premises environments through a single interface.
Alkira is distinct from Lumen’s existing Project Berkeley, which introduces fabric ports for building-to-cloud on-ramp connectivity.
“Fabric ports is about enabling building on-prem to be able to connect to the cloud and to be able to grow those services in a cloud economic way,” Johnson said. “The Alkira platform really focuses on the East-West interconnect. So that’s data center-to-data center, cloud-to-cloud, so they operate with more of a virtual port kind of a model, and it’s better together.”
Lumen’s Multi-Cloud Gateway bridges the two domains, enabling customers to connect any cloud and any data center over Lumen’s private network. After close, Multi-Cloud Gateway and Alkira together are intended to give customers a single control plane for routing, policy and security across both north-south and east-west connectivity.
