Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technologies (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The key takeaway that I get from listening to you is that you can retrofit existing non-cloud software and turn them into SaaS implementation using your PaaS. Where you’re distinguishing versus other PaaS is that you have to build on top of technology stacks.

Feyzi Fatehi: Well said with one exception. The software doesn’t have to be a non-cloud software. 99% of cloud software are not SaaS. Being on the cloud or being on the computer is not the point. That is the biggest misnomer in our industry.

That’s why I left Silicon Valley and came to Laguna Beach. There’s a little bit more space to be open to new ideas. Everything you said is correct with one exception. The software could be on-premise, not on the cloud or the software can be born on the cloud. That SaaSification process is exactly the same.

Corent has a tool to scan, analyze, migrate, optimize, and cloudify the software. That’s the other line of products that we have called Migration-as-a-Service (MaaS). The part we are talking about here is the next step. If the software is not on the cloud, we can cloudify.

If the software is already on the cloud, we just SaaS-enable it, i.e. add all the capabilities that Salesforce.com has in comparison with just another CRM solution that is not SaaS.

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down on that for me. If the software is already on the cloud, what needs to be done? How do you define SaaS-enabling?

Feyzi Fatehi: First misnomer, SaaS has nothing to do with the cloud. Salesforce.com had a million users before the technology for the cloud was invented. Before VMWare had its first hypervisor, Salesforce was a SaaS without the cloud. Let’s decouple the two concepts.

To me, cloud is a more efficient, better, more elastic version of computers. By putting your software on the cloud, it’s like putting my software on a newer computing infrastructure. It has nothing to do with SaaS. The more modern computing infrastructure, the more efficient your software runs.

Your software is not SaaS. The aaS is not included on it no matter where it’s running. What are the elements that transform software into SaaS. To date, we have 77 granted patents specifically on the elements of transforming software into SaaS. We have two dozen more in the making.

Let me explain the three main categories. The full list is 64 items that need to be built in addition to the actual software. Generally it’s 90% as opposed to 10%. 10% is the core software that does the CRM or hospital management. 90% is delivering it as-a-Service.

Tenancy management, operations management, and commercial management – these are capabilities that an enterprise software doesn’t need to have, no matter where they’re running. Tenancy management is adding multi-tenancy, hybrid tenancy, or single-tenancy.

There is a software somewhere and different entities can subscribe to that software and then have the admin rights to run their own company as if they own their own version of the software. Corent spent 15 years building technology around it. People say Salesforce.com legitimized SaaS. Corent is democratizing SaaS.

We didn’t build multi-tenancy, operations management, commercial management for one application. From day one, we built it so that it is configurable, customizable, reusable for every other software application in the same way that Intel built the processor for any computer. It built a general-purpose processor so it can be used from cellphones all the way to data centers in different configurations.

Sramana Mitra: New applications can be operating as SaaS covering all of those points that you made – operations management, tenancy management, commercial management – on any of the platforms like Salesforce for example.

Feyzi Fatehi: You can build your software anywhere you want – on Azure, Amazon, IBM. Then you just plug our service to your software and you define the idea of SaaS. Your software becomes SaaS.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technologies
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