Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m still missing what is the delta. Let’s say we’re building on Salesforce’s PaaS. Is that not a complete solution to go online as a SaaS product? Do people still need you to be in the middle of that?

Feyzi Fatehi: Salesforce has a specific platform that people develop certain types of applications on. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with it. 

Sramana Mitra: This is a problem. You’re making very big statements like cloud is not SaaS. It’s against the terminology that we use. We use cloud computing as the umbrella solution. Within that, there are various permutations and combinations. We use SaaS as a variation of cloud computing. We use IaaS as one of the variations.

All these utility computing solutions with the service being served from the cloud is our definition of cloud computing. You have a different world view. Now you’re telling me you’re not familiar with Salesforce.com. That’s a problem, right?

Feyzi Fatehi: I am a disruptor. I am disrupting your current thinking.

Sramana Mitra: I think the real disruptor has been Salesforce.com that has disrupted the entire industry and has paved the way for newer SaaS, IaaS, DaaS businesses to come into the market.

Feyzi Fatehi: Have you ever heard of a company called MapR?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Feyzi Fatehi: MapR tried, for a long time, to make their solution fast. It was a long journey. During the holidays, they contacted us and said, “Your CIO contacted us. We are making progress in making our solution SaaS. We need help to close the gaps. We tried to do it ourselves despite the fact that it wasn’t our job to become an expert in SaaS. We have done a lot of work but we cannot close the gap in certain aspects. It is possible to use Corent?”

A few weeks ago, we had a major press release that Corent completed the SaaSification of the MapR solution.

Sramana Mitra: My understanding is that there are many different ways that a piece of software can be SaaS-enabled as you call it. One way is to build the software – either rewrite or write a new piece of software on any of the PaaS.

You’re saying that your major value proposition is that you take existing software that has not been written on a PaaS platform that wants to retrofit into a SaaS delivery model. That’s where you have specialized expertise of being able to make that migration happen seamlessly. That part, I’m with you.

I asked you a question that you may want to investigate. What is the delta? If somebody is building on the Salesforce.com’s stack for instance, do they need you? It sounds like they don’t because you don’t seem to know much about Salesforce ecosystem.

That means that doesn’t come up in your implementations. That’s not an issue that comes up. You’re on orthogonal stacks so to speak. Is that a correct observation?

Feyzi Fatehi: Your observation is 90% correct. You said we can SaaS-enable software that is not built on a PaaS stack. That is not accurate. You can build your software on a PaaS stack or build it without PaaS. We can, in either case, transform it.

Sramana Mitra: I’m just using Salesforce as a proxy. Why do they need you? That is the delta that I’m looking for.

Feyzi Fatehi: This one, I just simply don’t know. I can find out. It doesn’t come up. We are having Azure bringing us customers to turn into SaaS. AWS had an eight-city tour in the US just with us. I just don’t know how everybody does it. If somebody has a software, they don’t want to build it from scratch. We can transform it to SaaS within a few hours. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technologies
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