Cloud Stocks: Qualys Scouting For Acquisitions

With the continuous digital transformation and growing adoption of smart connected devices supported by AI and Machine Learning capabilities, enterprise security systems globally are exposed to vulnerabilities. According to Gartner, enterprise spending on Security Technology is expected to grow to $124 billion this year. A MarketsandMarkets report expects the global cybersecurity market to grow 10% annually over the next four years to $248.3 billion by 2023. Another Research and Markets report expects the global security & vulnerability management market to grow 9% annually to become a $13.7 billion industry by 2026. These stellar growth projections are also getting reflected in the financial performance of the security players. Recently, cloud-based security player Qualys (Nasdaq: QLYS) reported its first quarter results that surpassed market expectations.

PaaS: Six Cloud Stock Picks Based on PaaS Prospects

Cloud products often tend to have low switching costs. The best way to create exit barriers is to have a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) strategy and invite entrepreneurial developers to come develop apps on it. As apps gain traction, some of the startups developing them can be acquired. Integration is easy because of the technology stack compatibility.

This is my analysis of how SaaS companies need to be scaled inorganically.

With this lens on, I have identified a set of cloud stocks that look promising for the next decade.

1. Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM). Their lead is so great in this space, that the chance of anyone else catching up is minuscule if not zero. Further analysis here.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: George Gallegos, CEO of Jitterbit (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the key trends in your space?

George Gallegos: There’s an explosion of cloud applications. About 150,000 SaaS apps are on the market today. There’s big transformation as companies are embracing these best-of-breed solutions to transform their business. This may be the customer engagement side of their business.

They have all these legacy products. Much of it might be on premise. They’ve got to connect these two worlds together – this new wave of innovative cloud technologies with the legacy products. That is what’s usually driving these projects. They are enabling these digital processes that tie the new world of apps together with the legacy apps existing in their enterprise. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: George Gallegos, CEO of Jitterbit (Part 1)

Jitterbit focuses on integrating cloud applications and caters to the non-technical users. Read on to understand the space better.

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

George Gallegos: I’m the CEO. I’ve been at Jitterbit since the beginning. We are an API transformation company. We help companies go through their digital transformation and connect all of their cloud to on-premise. We help them streamline that so that they can be more competitive.

Sramana Mitra: Can you double-click down on that and tell us how you do it? >>>

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 >>>

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  >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What are the key trends? You said rightly that it’s a very crowded space. What are the broad overriding trends in the space?

Lior Koriat: It’s a good question because you ask yourself that along the way, and you try to understand what would help customers choose you amongst others. What you see today as a main trend is that every customer becomes, more and more, a software company. We have customers that are very large paper manufacturers, for example. It turns out they have hundreds of developers developing websites because this is the way they go to market.

Even if you are a paper manufacturer or you are a technology manufacturer, you deliver your services through applications internally and >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali (Part 1)

This discussion delves into the depths of the decade-long evolution of the DevOps space.

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

Lior Koriat: I am the CEO of Quali. Quali is an innovator in the field of Environment-as-a-Service over any cloud infrastructure. I joined the company in 2007 as the VP of R&D and became CEO in late 2008. Prior to joining Quali, I founded and managed an engineering services company in Israel called Intellitech.

I joined Quali in 2007. Back then, it was focused on the industry around robotics and aviation. At that point, we believed that there is a large >>>