 Welcome everyone to this CUBE coverage of AWS re-invent 2021. We have a lot going on at this year's re-invent with over a hundred guests on the program. And I'm excited to welcome two of those guests here with me right now. We are joined by Ralph Munson, the Chief Information Officer at Warner Music Group and Atif Khan, the CTO of Alkira and founder of Alkira as well. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Thank you so much Lisa. So glad to be here with you. To be here. Yeah, good old fashioned Zoom has become our best friend in the last 22 months or so, I'm losing count. Atif, I'd like to start with you. I know Alkira has been on the key before but it's been a while and you guys are a relatively young company. Give the audience an overview of Alkira and what it is that you deliver. Absolutely Lisa. So we started back in May of 2018 in the cloud networking space, multi-cloud networking. And we came out of stealth mode back in April of 2020 and launched the company. In fact, one of our first events coming out of stealth mode was a Cuban interview back in April of 2020. So here at Alkira what we are doing is we are building a cloud platform which allows customers to build a common network across multiple clouds with built-in network and security services with a policy and management layer on top full end to end visibility and governance capabilities. And all of this is delivered as a service and consumed as a service as well. And I'm very glad to be here with Ralph who is from Warner Music Group and is one of our marquee customers. So I'll let Ralph introduce himself and tell us a bit more about Alkira and WMG's cloud journey. That sounds great. Ralph, why don't you start by giving the audience I'm sure everyone knows Warner Music Group but in case there's anyone out there that might not give us a little bit of a background. So yeah, so Warner Music Group has been around since 1950, right? 1940 even had its roots out of Hollywood and Warner Brothers pictures. Today's a global company in 79 countries we operated 50, 100 employees and we have two major divisions. We have our recorded music division which has the labels to commonly heard of Atlantic records, Warner Brothers records and so forth. And then we have our publishing division which is Warner Chapel which is where our songwriters live. And of course we have some singer songwriters that are in both sides of our business. But currently people may know our artists we have Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Coldplay, Cardi B, Blake Shelton and I can go on and on. But exciting, great year. We're having one of our best years ever. And I'm glad to be here and partnering with Alkira. Excellent, I love all of those artists that you mentioned fantastic. So let's talk a little bit about now Ralph about the backstory. Talk to me about the IT infrastructure at Warner Music Group what you had there and some of the challenges that you had that you came to Alkira to solve. Yeah, well initially when I took over about five years ago now we were very much a data center based business with traditional networking and IT functions. Additionally with our foreign affiliates IT was sort of decentralized in the sense that a lot of the networking and data center components were left to regions. And so while we operated globally we didn't really operate globally at Warner among our affiliates. So one of the challenges was how do we get out of the data center? Cloud was new. One of the big things that were coming with big data which is absolutely right for moving going straight to the cloud especially if you don't have anything on-prem and how do we rationalize all of these different locations and conduct all the M&A we've been doing. So it was quite a challenge. Really at the end we wanted to have one view of the network. And Alkira, I looked at many of companies and Alkira is the best tool providing that to us. Well talk to me a little bit more about why Alkira because as Atif was saying they're very young what came out of stealth mode during the pandemic Warner Music Group being around since the 40s and 50s, the legacy institution, a great brand. What made you take a risk on such an early stage startup? Quite frankly, there was nothing in the space at the time we looked. There were companies that had components of it of what Alkira does which is basically network orchestration allowing us to use the existing components and nobody had the whole package especially incorporating security. So we figured why not take a chance? There's no, it won't hurt, there's no harm and if anything is successful it will give us a great ability to manage our network much more efficiently taking things that took days down to hours and being able to do it much more efficiently with much fewer staff as opposed to hiring a lot more. Because when you orchestrate all the components that are underneath, obviously it requires more bodies more resources. Right and that efficiency and cost optimization is key there. Atif I have to ask you, talk to me about this is only a few years ago the gap in the market that you and your brother saw a few years ago when you founded the company because as Rob was saying there was nobody else in the market at the time that could do what you're doing. Yeah, absolutely. So Lisa, as you know, myself and Amir we were also part of the founding team of Viptella which was the SDUAN company. So back in the day when we did SDUAN the requirement was to connect sites together. So if you go back like 5, 10, 5, 7, 10 years ago networking was done to connect sites together which could be remote sites, data centers sites to data centers, all of that together. But fast forward a few more years with the adoption of cloud requirements changed from the networking perspective. So now your network is not just connecting sites together but most of the traffic now is from sites or users which could be sitting anywhere. If you look at what's going on in the pandemic people are working from all across the globe they're not just sitting in campuses or sites. So traffic patterns are from sites or users to mostly to the cloud or SaaS applications. So now networks also need to evolve and they need to be built inside the cloud rather than from outside or connecting to the cloud. So cloud access is one capability but building a network inside the cloud it becomes a requirement. And secondly, now it's not just only about connectivity because security becomes even more important because your security perimeter is changing as well. So securing all these cloud networks becomes very, very complicated. And now as Ralph can tell you majority of the enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy and each cloud is done differently. So the moment you bring in multiple clouds, multiple regions across the globe it becomes so complicated for enterprises to build and manage. They need something or a platform which makes it easy gives them one way of doing networking, building a common network across whether you're connecting multiple clouds or clouds to your on-prem locations or clouds to internet or sites to internet. So that's where we saw this gap and we decided to build Elkira to tackle this problem. Got it. So Ralph, let's talk now about what you've implemented as a team was saying we live in this work from anywhere hybrid multi-cloud world. Talk to us about Warner, what you implemented and maybe a little bit about your multi-cloud strategy if you've got one. Yeah, so over the last five years Warner has migrated entirely into cloud and to a point before it's multi-cloud and we're mainly in AWS but you have some Azure and some Google Cloud. And with that I was telling a team from Amir, I remember it was interesting when they built the cloud it's like they totally forgot about the networking aspect. So you have ease of use for services and service inside the cloud but networking was not really present not to mention when it was built out it wasn't made to go to competing clouds. So most companies are facing this problem. How do you treat these environments as a single holistic environment? How do you turn things up, turn things down? How do you secure it when every single one is different having some unique ways of doing things? So that really was how we ended up looking for an Elkira because I just kept looking at the costs and the footprint grow and grow and grow and the complexity to a point before is growing exponentially. One change in one thing would lead to two changes to another. If you add another cloud or you add another point on the network you've got exponential growth and complexity you had to deal with. So one stop shop. One stop shop and reducing that complexity talk to me about reducing complexity and what you're accomplishing there especially in the last year and a half is things have been so dynamic, shall we say? Yeah. Well, I will say this. It was turnkey. For the most part, it took a matter of months as opposed to years because out of the box there was a lot of integrations with the major network of players. So as of right now you can buy firewalls, routing, VPC, things like this, they all exist but they're not orchestrating together. And then you have policies and security again, not orchestrating a different set of tools. So it really only took us two to three months to get it up and running. And I was just, actually I just had a conversation with them when we were going to finish. So I think we'll be finishing this up completely in January at some time. That's fantastic. So really, sorry Ralph, a fast time to market there with getting things implemented. Talk to me about from a business outcome perspective your CIO, what are some of the outcomes that this technology is enabling you to deliver it back to the business? Yeah, really the number one, two big ones come to mind. One, being able to provide a security enterprise. I know when there's a change it's made uniform for our network without some note or some piece being forgotten about. So that's number one, security is big. You can imagine a company like Warner with marquee brands, all brands, any company with marquee brands are targets today. That's number one. Number two is our time to market for eminent. So when we buy a company the time it takes us to get them to be completely part of Warner and therefore start realizing the business case and benefits are the reason we bought it bought the company to begin with. So we're buying a lot more and we're turning them up and turning those business cases up faster. But usually those cases would say things like six months to a year to integrate with us. And then we can unlock this set of benefits. Now it's more like two to three months and you start to be able to lock the benefits sooner. And of course those are different in a case by case basis, but that's, that's. Sure, but significantly faster there. You know, you're looking at a two to three X multiplier there as you talked about. Now you mentioned multicloud rail. So here we are at reinvent. I imagine part of your AWS as part of your cloud infrastructure and they're a technology partner of Al Kira's. Correct. Yeah, so AWS is actually our biggest cloud provider of the three. And yeah, they're a partner with Al Kira. So good. And you, Al Kira is a technology partner of AWS, correct? Yes, Al Kira is a technology partner of AWS. We are also available on AWS's marketplace. So customers can consume Al Kira's platform from AWS's marketplace as well. But given the fact that so many businesses in every industry are multicloud, I assume that you work with all the cloud vendors, Atif. Yeah? Absolutely. So our platform runs inside of the cloud. It runs in AWS's cloud as well. And from there it connects to multiple cloud. So if customers need to connect to Azure or AWS from there or Oracle cloud or any other cloud for that matter, they can connect from our platform. And our platform is, it scales horizontally. So as customers needs scale, it scales as well. And one of the key advantages is it's consumed as a service. So there's no software to download or hardware to run for or to acquire for any of the customers. It's a software solution and it's consumed as a service. Got it. Raph, one more question for you before we wrap things up here. I want to get your recommendations for IT executives, CIOs who might be in a similar situation to you, whether or not they are with a legacy organization. What are some of your recommendations that you say you need to be looking at A, B and C? Yeah, I would primarily say really to be looking at some of these newer technologies that can help speed up people, especially in this case, to have transition to the cloud and that planning ahead of time, especially goal setting, I find to be with any of these license providers is absolutely paramount. Because you can, if you don't make your organization take it up, take that step forward, you can end up with shellware. So I make sure that it's very important that when you commit to this, you commit fully, you plan it out and you make sure you actually use it to get the benefits. One of my pet peeves is shellware, so I have a bit of it. Well, you've been there, it costs a lot of money and it doesn't do any good, it doesn't move the business forward. And in this day and age, there is a competitor right behind in the rearview mirror who might be smaller, more nimble, more agile, who can take your place easily if the organization isn't willing to take the risks and commit, as you said. Atif, last question over for you. Where can customers go to learn more? I know you are at reinvent your booth 1628, but what do you recommend folks go attendees of the event as well as other prospects to go to learn more about what you guys are delivering for companies like Warner Music Group? So if you're at reinvent, please stop by our booth and one of our cloud specialists will give you a demo as well. So it's a very quick demo and you'll see how we are reinventing that working for the cloud era. You can also go to our website and you'll find a lot of information on our website. You can request a demo there as well. So look forward to seeing most of you at our booth and those who are not attending in person, please go visit our website. Reinventing networking. I'd like your play on words there, Atif. Very appropriate. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me today talking about Elkira Warner Music Group, what you guys are doing together and how this new early stage technology is really quite transformative. We appreciate your insights. Thank you. Thank you so much. For Ralph Munson and Atif Khan, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching The Cube's continuous coverage of AWS Reinvent 2021. Thanks for watching.