Deterministic Networks: Rebuilding the AI Backbone

Graphiant Founder and President Khalid Raza explains why the AI era demands a new approach to connectivity, one built on deterministic infrastructure, observability, sovereignty, and automation rather than overlays. As AI traffic shifts east-west and agents operate everywhere, can existing IP VPN infrastructure evolve into the programmable AI fabric enterprises need?

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In this Executives at the Edge episode, host Pascal Menezes explores these topics and more with Khalid Raza of Graphiant:

How are AI traffic patterns reshaping assumptions around internet and SD-WAN architectures?
Could existing IP VPN infrastructure evolve into a programmable AI fabric?
Why are deterministic networking and observability becoming critical in agentic AI environments?
Why are sovereignty, security, and reduced attack surfaces becoming foundational infrastructure requirements?
What must telecom providers do to remain central in the AI connectivity era?

Learn More

Discover how Mplify’s Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) APIs and automation frameworks help providers coordinate and program connectivity across multi-provider ecosystems.
Read “The $15.7 Trillion Bottleneck: Why AI’s Future Depends on Rewiring the Internet” to understand how AI-era infrastructure demands more deterministic, programmable, and observable connectivity models in this blog from Pascal Menezes.
Learn how Mplify is advancing programmable, interoperable Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) frameworks designed to support distributed AI infrastructure and the AI-powered digital economy.

About Our Guest

Khalid Raza, Founder & Visionary, Graphiant; Inventor of SD-WAN

Khalid Raza has spent three decades thinking about a problem most people don’t know exists: how information actually moves across the world, and why the infrastructure carrying it keeps breaking under the weight of its own complexity.

He arrived at Cisco in 1993, just as the commercial internet was finding its footing, and spent the next seventeen years inside the machinery of global connectivity, architecting networks for the carriers and institutions that form the backbone of modern commerce — including AT&T, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, and JP Morgan Chase. When those networks failed, business stopped. Khalid’s instinct, then as now, was to ask whether the failure was a symptom of something more structural, and whether a cleaner idea existed somewhere upstream.

That instinct produced SD-WAN. As co-founder and CTO of Viptela, Khalid applied software-defined principles to wide-area networking at a moment when most of the industry considered the problem already solved. Viptela’s acquisition by Cisco for $610 million validated the approach; the $8 billion industry that followed validated the idea.

His company, Graphiant, is the next chapter in that same path of inquiry. The question Khalid is pursuing now is whether enterprise networking can be rebuilt from first principles, to bring about intelligent infrastructure for the next generation of networks.

Executives at the Edge podcast is brought to you by Mplify, a global alliance of network, cloud, cybersecurity, and enterprise organizations working together to accelerate the AI-powered digital economy through standardization, automation, certification, and collaboration.

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