Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali (Part 4)

Lior Koriat: You have a mix of monolithic applications that you’re gradually modernizing and turning them into microservice-based architecture. You’re also balancing the workloads between your private and public cloud. The way we are trying to solve it is, first of all, have everything be available as a service and support those different technologies under the hood so it is possible to really design anything that you need that might morph and change throughout the development process.

In IT and business operations, this has been a very fruitful area for us. As a customer, the ability to not just showcase and demonstrate your product at scale to your audience but also to train and support your partners is a growing trend. We see a lot of adoption there. There are many players in this space. We are unique in the sense that we deliver that on a public cloud as well as your private cloud. Your products might be too complex or may have some physical elements associated.

Simplicity and ease of access is key to building your business. If you want to demo your product in a certain ecosystem, you want to do it fast and you want to do it on demand. Lastly, in security and compliance, what we see growing very fast is the world of cyber ranges. It’s an environment. You have a blue team that is defending and a red team that is attacking. You might do it for training purposes or just to constantly validate your security stack.

This is a growing area with not just federal but also enterprises and telcos. Being able to model an environment that is a mix of different security technologies and do it in a mix of public and private cloud is key. That’s the use cases.

Sramana Mitra: Everything has become complicated. The layers of abstraction have become critical to making all this scale.

Lior Koriat: Exactly. The world is full with solutions, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easier for the customer to eventually do their work. Their work is to develop their product and to sell their product. Now, they are required to master a lot of different solutions and technologies just to do their job. We are trying to simplify all that and to mask all the complexity from them.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent.

Lior Koriat: One more question that you asked was where to start a company today. I thought long and hard about this question. I can list out 10 different things but from an entrepreneur perspective, because the market is so cluttered, and the cycle of innovation now is so quick, and because you’re competing against a lot of open source solutions that are out there, customers eventually find it very hard to decide what to use. They might even put a lot of thought into that.

At the end of the day, what would help me grow faster is it would not only be about the technology. How easy it is to consume your solution is also a big factor. One of the challenges that we face today is you sell against a certain ROI. Why would you spend X amount of money on this service? How do you prove that ROI? How do you even measure it? A lot of it is not necessarily as tangible. If you do prove it, you have already proven it after you have saved the customer a lot of money. Why would he spend $100,000 a year on a solution if you cannot measure that?

Being able to show the ROI so you can build a pricing and go-to market model would be a gap to solve. Some of these things can only be measured after the fact but there are a lot of elements and factors that influence it. It should make it easy to understand where your solution is adding value. That’s something that I believe would help everybody accelerate in the market.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Quite a unique perspective. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali
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