Amir Khan

President, CEO & Founder

Amir Khan is a computer networking visionary who founded and led Viptela’s market-leading, cloud-first, Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN) business before its acquisition by Cisco. As prescient as he was in identifying the $8B opportunity for SD-WAN, Amir recognized that the network hampered the cloud journey. Amir and CTO Atif Khan founded Alkira in 2018 to reinvent networking for the cloud era. Before Viptela, Amir held leadership roles at Cisco, Juniper, and Nortel. He holds 4 patents. Amir earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mississippi.

Atif Khan

CTO & Founder

Atif Khan is a renowned routing expert with extensive experience bringing ground-breaking networking solutions to market and in architecting some of the largest and most sophisticated global networks. He is responsible for Alkira’s technology vision and overall engineering and product development of the Alkira Cloud Networking platform. Atif was VP Technology and Solutions, and a founding team member at Viptela, where he developed a world-class, cloud-first, highly scalable SD-WAN solution with advanced routing, segmentation, and security capabilities. Following the Viptela acquisition, Atif was Senior Director of the Enterprise Networking Business at Cisco. Prior to Viptela he held senior positions at Alcatel, Huawei and Juniper Networks and holds 7 patents in routing, security and overlay multicast. Atif received a BS in Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Ahmed Datoo

Chief Marketing Officer

Ahmed’s experience in the technology industry spans software engineering, product management, marketing, and strategy. Prior to Alkira, Ahmed has held executive roles at Citrix, Zenprise, Inkling, and Mesmer. He’s quoted in articles in the WSJ, NYTimes, Economist, Network World, USA Today and has spoken at events at Stanford University, Interop, Gartner, and VentureBeat. Ahmed holds an MBA, MA, and BA from Stanford University and has 6 patents.

Manan Shah

VP of Product Management

Manan Shah heads Product Management at Alkira, Inc. He brings 20+ years of experience in Product Management, leadership and people management across a variety of networking and cloud computing companies. He has extensive experience defining, developing and executing SD-WAN, SaaS, IaaS, networking products and bringing disruptive technologies to the market. Manan was previously Director of Product Management at Viptela and Cisco and held product management roles at Citrix and Brocade. Manan received his Masters in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University and holds 3 patents in network security and network management.

Paul Couturier

Senior VP of International Sales

Paul joins Alkira from IntSights, where he led the international organization as the first person on the ground back in 2017 to a flourishing and successful team in both Europe and Asia. IntSights was successfully acquired in July of 2021 by Rapid 7. Prior to IntSights, Paul held key positions with successful security and networking highly innovative startup companies including, TippingPoint (HP), Efficient Networks (Siemens), Cyan (Cienna) and BlueCat Networks (PE). At all companies, Paul was instrumental in building the organizations from their early go to market deployment till either IPO or acquisition.

Himanshu Shah

VP of Engineering

Himanshu Shah has more than 20 years of experience in the networking industry and heads Engineering at Alkira. He specializes in building scalable networking systems, routing, and mobility protocols. Before joining Alkira, Himanshu was a member of the founding engineering team at Viptela, where he helped the team design and implement industry-leading SD-WAN solutions. Following the acquisition of Viptela, Himanshu helped plan and design various other Cisco solutions integrated with SD-WAN. Prior to Viptela, Himanshu held senior engineering roles at Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper, where he helped the teams to bootstrap and implement mobile gateway (LTE) products. He holds 17 patents across the networking systems. Himanshu holds an MS in Computer Science from the University of Kentucky.

Harbrinder Kang

VP of People & Operations

Harbrinder is a creative and visionary executive that has provided business and strategy leadership to both Silicon Valley startups and Fortune 100 companies. Hailing from Cisco, Harbrinder was responsible for delivering Cisco’s longest-running and highest impact CSR program, the Cisco Networking Academy. He is passionate about social impact, sustainability and the effects of digital transformation. Harbrinder has a proven track record in developing strategy, building teams and driving operational efficiency as well as developing a more authentic and open culture.

Ramakanth Gunuganti

Chief Software Architect

Ramakanth Gunuganti is Alkira’s Chief Software Architect with over 20 years of experience in networking, security, platforms and cloud computing. He has a deep understanding of the internals of cloud networking and is passionate about leveraging that experience to solve enterprise cloud networking problems. Ramakanth joined Alkira from Microsoft where he was Principal Engineer involved in building Azure ExpressRoute Direct and scaling the service to 100Gbps. Prior to that, he was Director of Engineering at Cisco (Insieme) working on ACI and a Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks. He holds 6 patents and has a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas, San Antonio.

Santosh Kumar Dornal

Head of Software Test & Devops

Santosh Kumar Dornal has over 12 year of experience in the computer networking industry. Santosh currently heads the Software Test and Devops team at Alkira Inc. Santosh has extensive experience in SD-WAN, Cloud networking and mobile gateway platforms. Before Alkira, Santosh was a key member of the Viptela team where he was responsible for scaling the solution, solving cloud connectivity problems and ensuring that customer deployments are smooth. Prior to Viptela, Santosh held positions in Starent Networks (acquired by Cisco systems), Juniper networks and Ixia technologies, where he pioneered the LTE technology and helped build world class mobile gateways. Santosh holds B.Tech in Electronics and communications from JNTU, India and MS in computer networking from I2IT Pune, India.

Alkira Demo

See 
Cloud Area Networking in Action!

Schedule a 30-minute demonstration with a cloud specialist today and we’ll show you how to:

  • Cut cloud networking provisioning time from months to minutes
  • Get simple, as-a-service consumption for your global cloud network with no upfront costs or CAPEX
  • Ensure enterprise-grade security when moving to cloud

Slash Cloud Network Deployment Time & TCO

Just draw your new cloud network on a simple canvas, and with one click watch it come to life