Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technologies (Part 1)

Feyzi has built technology that enables legacy applications to become SaaS-enabled seamlessly and rapidly. Excellent thought leadership.

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

Feyzi Fatehi: I’m the CEO of Corent Technologies. Corent stands for core enterprise in the same way that Intel stands for integrated electronics. Corent was coined by one of the people who was involved in coining the phrase “Intel Inside”, which I fell in love with when I was in business school doing my MBA in Santa Clara while working for HP.

I had an epiphany. Intel built a processor that became the foundation of democratizing PCs in the world. Michael Dell who went to school with me at UT Austin, probably would not be able to build Dell Computer if Intel had not built the processor.

The epiphany was, how can we mirror this huge business model disruption in the software industry. I did my Masters in Software Engineering. I had fallen in love with the software industry and the Intel Inside model. I said, “How can bring the two together?”

That was the time that I ran into Steve Jobs at Stanford and he encouraged me to push the limits and go for something impossible. He said, “Feyzi, if you don’t make it, it’s impossible anyway. What if you make it?” Being an intrapreneur within HP, I was part of a five-person team that invented the first real-time database. We got it patented in 1989. It was the first real-time memory-based database.

We said, “With that kind of background, is it a metaphorical equivalent of Intel Inside for the software industry?” Today, Corent has created the Intel Inside for the software industry by abstracting the asset service capabilities of Software-as-a-Service. We offer Capabilities-as-a-Service so we relieve the software vendors to reinvent the wheel.

Marc Benioff once told me, “It took five years and $123 million to build the initial asset service capabilities of Salesforce.” Today, we offer those capabilities without any programming within a matter of hours to any software vendor out there. We SaaS-enable existing solutions.

Sramana Mitra: My first question is it’s a very long way from where Marc Benioff was starting Salesforce.com. Cloud was an unknown concept. As-a-service was very new, but the market has dramatically shifted now.

There are many stacks available for people to SaaS-enable, as you call it, their applications whether it’s building on an Azure platform or AWS. Salesforce itself has its Platform-as-a-Service. Given that the Platform-as-a-Service trend is so big, where do you fit into this?

Feyzi Fatehi: That is an excellent question. Marc Benioff and I were among the five keynote  speakers at the first European cloud and SaaS conference in 2001. The term cloud and SaaS, as you may remember, were not even coined. It was applications service provider (ASP).

There was the idea of how we can streamline the process of SaaS as opposed to every company trying to reinvent the wheel. The concept of PaaS came along. You’re absolutely right. The concept of PaaS is there for people who want to build sophisticated software applications. They can use any of those stacks to accelerate the building of their software application.

Let’s say there are 3,500 CRM solutions out there. Turning one of them into having the capabilities that Salesforce.com, Workday, SuccessFactors have would take years and a massive amount of engineering no matter what PaaS solution you use. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technologies
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