rolex
SSupported by cloud hosting provider DigitalOcean – Try DigitalOcean now and receive a $200 when you create a new account!

Quali Shaping Cloud Sandbox Market Behind Lior Koriat

Listen to this article

Quali was founded to tap into automation trends much before it became a buzzword today. Automation is in our DNA. The company had its genesis in Israel. Today the company has evolved to provide all aspects of intelligent automation and orchestration solutions for a variety of dev/test and other use-cases, saving its customers millions of dollars in their budgets in addition to helping them with their agile IT requirements. Below is our interview with Lior Koriat, CEO of Quali:

Lior_Koriat

Q: What’s your professional background prior to joining Quali?

A: I come from both a technical and a business background. By education I’m a computer science major with an economics background from the Tel Aviv university. Early in my career I used to fly military aircrafts, and after my service I founded Intellitech Engineering. My focus at Intellitech was system and software engineering in the fields of avionics, robotics, communications, control, real-time and embedded applications and algorithms.

Early in 2007 I got the opportunity to join Quali as its VP of Engineering and soon became the company’s COO and subsequently the CEO bythe end of 2008. For those coming in from a defense background, it is always interesting to see how some state-of-the art technologies gradually mainstream to industry at large. My background helped to look a bit further into the future and align to where the puck needed to be.

I also was fortunate to have an amazing team come and joint Quali at critical phases to drive innovation and sales, where, today we can claim to be one of the leading cloud management and automation companies in the industry.

Quali_CloudShell-Live-Workspace-Blueprint-Catalog-Flex-Full-System-TestRecommended: TrenData Delivers Actionable People Insights To Help Companies Optimize The Performance Of Their Workforce

Q: How did Quali get started?

A: The founders of Quali and I were always passionate about test automation. We developed a platform called TestShell that quickly became a runaway success and was considered by many as the Industry gold standard.

Subsequently we realized the trend was towards infrastructure automation, as that was where the complexity was. We focused on attacking that problem and developed a new software platform called CloudShell which helped us gain entry into several of the Global 100. As IT environments became more complex, we started to realize the value of automating these environments and delivering them as a service, on-demand and across any cloud – public, private or hybrid. This is what we’re doing today – we are the best in-class solution for delivering environments-as-a-service on any cloud.
While we were originally cracking the problem for cloud providers, telcos, technology vendors and large enterprise, the needs of digitization have broadened our appeal to mainstream and mid-tier enterprises now and our market footprint is rapidly expanding.

A majority of our customers are in North America. However, we have a significant presence in Europe and an expanding presence in the Asia Pacific region.

Q: What’s the biggest pain point that organizations have in terms of IT infrastructure?

A: Motivated by digitization, competitive disruption and in a bid to improve cost efficiencies most companies are embracing technology and software to radically improve and even shift their business models. There is a top down emphasis on speed, service delivery and customer experience.

So IT as well as application development teams in particular are often incented to move into faster release delivery cycles and time to market is critical. In this context, infrastructure often becomes a bottleneck. Many enterprises, and even service providers have large infrastructure investments made over several decades, that are working but don’t lend themselves to agile methods of today. Dev/Test teams in many organizations spend weeks waiting for the right infrastructure environment.

Several organizations with their own data centers and private clouds have a dependency on physical infrastructure. Access to these in a structured way is often challenging. Further aligning infrastructure to the needs to modern application development is often quite complex and manual.

These are the problems we have solved with CloudShell. Our goal is to attack complexity. We can integrate with most infrastructure elements in any complex environments, model them and convert them into self-service environments. This eliminates the “waiting-in-line”. We are also viewed as a next-generation automation and orchestration platform, that can deploy these environments on any public, private or hybrid cloud environment and manage the resources. The goal is to make infrastructure invisible and the access of it as simple as clicking a button.

Quali_CloudShellRecommended: reevert: The Next Generation Hybrid-Backup Solution That Offers Instant Recovery From Ransomware Infections

Q: Where do you see the cloud sandbox market going in the next year? Next 5 years?

A: I am upbeat about this market. Today we see a number of tool and platform vendors that have focused on managing production environments. But some of the biggest challenges in optimizing are in pre-production, where we have a significant Dev/Test focus and there isn’t a lot of standardization. We focused on tackling this area first.

There is great merit in bringing consistency between production and pre-production environments and taking an environment in a consistent way from creation to production and back. It will result in higher quality, lesser rework and increase business uptime. This is a tough problem to solve, but we are doing it.

Over the next few years we want to unshackle all sorts of environments across any stage of dev-test-production-ops lifecycle on any cloud and help our customers hit the turbo button on accelerating innovation.

Q: What separates Quali from your competitors?

A: There’s a perception that we compete with the likes of Puppet and Chef. We don’t. In fact, we actually integrate with such platforms as we replicate production environments. Our strength is in creating sandboxes of different architectures and for different use-cases – DevOps CI/CD, Cloud, IoT, Security – you name it – and to offer it as a service.

In that, CloudShell platform is highly differentiated. There is no other product today that can automate and orchestrate the full-stack of the IT environment embracing legacy and modern IT. This allows customers to solve very complex problems in their IT environments in a simple, cost-effective manner. We experience a high renewal rate with customers.

We are also cloud agnostic and support various public, private and hybrid cloud environments.

Quali_Blueprint-Catalog-DashboardRecommended: STK Provides A Universally Accessible Solution For Global Access To Your Money – In Any Currency

Q: What are Quali’s plans for the future?

A: We are continuing to scale our operations globally and would like to accelerate that. Our partner ecosystem continues to get built out. We are attracting new buying centers.

My goal is to continue to on-board best-in-class talent and to continue to make major roads into the enterprise market segment. We are expanding our sales and R&D teams to help fuel the growth.

Did I mention we’re hiring?

Activate Social Media:
Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedin
,
Mercedes-Benz-EQS