Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the open problems in the spaces? We’re in a different stage from where you started. Where are we now? Where are the open problems?

Lior Koriat: One of the open problems that is starting to be addressed today is scale. It’s great that you can now easily scale into an endless ocean of infrastructure and scale out as much as you need, but then you have other challenges around governance, optimization, and collaboration between teams. There’s also visibility into how much you are consuming and how you are servicing your user. Are you locked to a single vendor? On top of that, there are challenges around security.

A lot of these are being addressed today by various startups or more mature companies. Some are still not entirely solved. I think that there is still a lack of visibility or understanding of how you are spending on the cloud and how you can optimize that. How can you broker service in a way that it’s going to be the most efficient for you between the cost, performance, and location? That’s still an open challenge. I know there are a lot of companies trying to address it. We are addressing that to some degree.

I know customers are not entirely benefiting from it just yet. That’s an open area. Also, software becomes more and more liquid, if you will. Everybody can consume, but you want to do it in a way that it is not only scalable and affordable but also under control. This is also being addressed by some leaders in the industry, but the sheer scale of it makes it hard.

Sramana Mitra: What I would like you to do next for me is take us through a use case of how your customers are using the Quali technology. Put that in the context of a bit of an ecosystem map on who’s doing what. These open problems that you talked about, where does that fit in the context of that use case? Would that be an interesting way to continue this conversation?

Lior Koriat: Absolutely. The use cases that we address today are somewhat driven by what I described before which is where we saw the revenue coming from about two to three years ago. We are not a young startup. We are more of a later-stage startup. We are growing in revenue and are dependent on our revenue. You have to also prioritize where the market and the money is.

We have been approached by engineering groups. We have been approached by business operation groups whether it’s sales or support. Recently, we have been approached by security and compliance. We look at that as the three top use cases today. One is everything around development and test. Providing development and test environments is key to any agility and even to start thinking about your DevOps processes.

What we do there is you, as a customer, have your infrastructure. You want your developers to be able to spin out replications of your solution of your product as well as other elements that you need in the environment, and be able to design and consume it on demand. That’s fairly simple-to-understand use case. The challenge is not necessarily from the concept but on the fact that the underlying infrastructure might be hybrid – the network might be a mix of physical and virtual.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali
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