Lumen completes Alkira acquisition to boost enterprise networking

Lumen Technologies has announced that has completed its acquisition of Alkira.

Alkira serves enterprise customers across financial services, technology, retail, healthcare and manufacturing sectors globally. The $475m all-cash transaction is designed to pair its hybrid and multi-cloud native control plane with Lumen’s fibre network, advancing the latter’s digital platform strategy to deliver cloud-like consumption for global enterprise networking.

Putting the acquisition into context, Lumen noted that as artificial intelligence (AI) workloads and inference data expand over multiple clouds, regions and technology platforms, enterprises need a faster, more intelligent way to manage traffic through that complexity.

An underlying rationale is said to be the programmable network imperative in how AI is reshaping how enterprises operate, and how their networks must perform. Lumen believes more than half of current internet traffic is automated and generated by software systems rather than human users. That means networks have to be big, fast, intelligent and secure enough to keep up.

Yet, said Lumen, many enterprise networks remain static, manually configured and fragmented across providers. To alleviate this issue, it said it is working to define a new category of enterprise networking – one built on physical infrastructure, a programmable network and a connected ecosystem of clouds, applications and partners.

Lumen regards the Alkira acquisition as a way to accelerate this vision of a programmable network with a single control plane that orchestrates connectivity beyond its network across datacentres, multiple clouds, partner ecosystems and on-premise environments.

By combining Alkira’s technology with its physical infrastructure, programmable network and partner ecosystem, Lumen says it will aim to simplify how enterprises build and manage their networks as environments grow more complex. Specifically, it claims that unlike providers that offer only connectivity or orchestration, Lumen says it now brings together both the physical network foundation and an on-demand platform to accelerate a more programmable, AI-ready network experience.

Lumen also believes that the acquisition strengthens its position as the trusted network for AI, while expanding the networking, cloud, security, and AI services customers need to run more agile, connected operations.

For businesses, Lumen assured that this will mean a simpler way to manage increasingly complex infrastructure and deploy their choice of services, capacity, and capabilities. It added that through one programmable network, businesses can enforce consistent security policies, gain better visibility and monitoring, and reduce manual work and slow provisioning. Over time, deeper integration with connectivity services will be offered to help businesses extend these benefits across more of their technology footprint.

“AI is reshaping how businesses operate, creating unprecedented demand for intelligent, programmable networks that can move data securely and seamlessly across cloud, edge and data centre environments,” said Kate Johnson, CEO of Lumen.

“By bringing Alkira into Lumen, we're combining world-class network infrastructure with cloud networking innovation to make complex environments simpler for customers. This is another important step in our transformation and strengthens our ability to help customers build, scale, and operate in the AI era.”

Going forward, as integration within Lumen general networking system progresses, Alkira’s technology is expected to become a Lumen Connect solution, unifying Lumen Multi-Cloud Gateway, cloud on-ramps, and on-net and off-net connectivity into a more streamlined digital experience. This is intended to simplify network operations, improving efficiency and advancing Network-as-a-Service offers.