Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali (Part 1)

This discussion delves into the depths of the decade-long evolution of the DevOps space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well Quali.

Lior Koriat: I am the CEO of Quali. Quali is an innovator in the field of Environment-as-a-Service over any cloud infrastructure. I joined the company in 2007 as the VP of R&D and became CEO in late 2008. Prior to joining Quali, I founded and managed an engineering services company in Israel called Intellitech.

I joined Quali in 2007. Back then, it was focused on the industry around robotics and aviation. At that point, we believed that there is a large challenge in helping automate infrastructure for a lot of customers. Over the years, this evolved into virtual infrastructure as well as public and private cloud. With that, we have evolved to what we are today, which is leading a category that is called Environment-as-a-Service. It simplifies the way enterprise users access and consume applications and infrastructure to address their basic needs from development all the way to operations.

We offer an innovative solution over hybrid infrastructure from private cloud to public cloud. We have a full spectrum delivery model that includes both on-premise and SaaS. Today, we sell to hundreds of large enterprises as well as telcos. We try and focus on the enterprise in financial services, healthcare, and retail.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers do you like to target? Where is your traction?

Lior Koriat: This is a very crowded space. There are lots of companies like Quali that offer somewhat similar solutions, but everybody is claiming pretty much the same positioning. It is cluttered and confusing. A lot of people might be using the same terminology to describe the markets that they’re after. We have seen a lot of success in the DevOps space, predominantly, with developers and testers.

About three or four years ago, because of this cloud innovation being adopted by innovators like developers or some of the business functions, we did see a lot budget for consuming a solution like ours. Gartner referred to that as shadow IT, meaning that different business functions were going to the cloud themselves with their rogue IT operations and spending their own money on various cloud solutions. We actually saw that as an opportunity to go after the leaders of business clients.

For example, the VP of Engineering has to service his engineering group. They need an infrastructure for that. They need to do that in an agile fashion. It could also be VP of Sales or Marketing that need to drive a lot more demos. The traditional way, 5 to 10 years ago, was to actually go with your product to the customer. Today, you can do that in a cloud fashion.

We saw this trend about three to four years ago. Today, I’m very happy to see that IT has caught up. We are approaching CIOs of IT organizations with our solution through which they deliver as-a-service experience to their business units and not only responding to tickets and requests.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali
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