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 >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The other thing that I’ve seen in my career in various instances is, people get software and they don’t usually use it or they don’t have the staff who can take advantage of the capabilities of the software. You deliver the Ferrari and are driving it like a Toyota. In a lot of those cases, the SaaS-enabled BPO often can deliver a lot more value because the people who are driving the software are driving like it should be driven.

Brian Jacobs: I should say that the shelf-ware phenomenon is going away in the cloud world. You can stop the subscription if you’re not getting value. The SaaS companies are all very attuned to the understanding that if their customers are not getting value, they will leave. Every company we know has this customer success function which is, all around, making sure that the customer is really using the product. Your main point is an excellent one. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What stage do you recommend people to make that shift in your orbit? Are we talking about getting to a million and then moving to Silicon Valley? We see all kinds of permutations and combinations of this behavior. I’m curious what your thoughts are on this.

Brian Jacobs: Rather than a revenue number, I think more in terms of product-market fit. If you’ve got a product that is clearly meeting the needs of your customers and you believe that it’s time to put your foot on the gas and grow your sales and marketing capabilities, then that’s a good time to do it. We see some companies which, for instance, are offering their products on a freemium basis. They are getting no revenue from those customers, but you can start to see if the product is meeting the customer’s needs. That’s more important to us than a specific revenue number. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 3)

Brian Jacobs: As far as the future of the cloud is concerned, I think we continue to see more and more innovation. I believe innovation begets more innovation. Once you see how the cloud changes your business, you start to see new opportunities that maybe weren’t so visible initially.

I think that this idea around industry cloud, which is a vertical software company that is enabling competitors to aggregate data and share data without compromising their trade secrets, is an exciting opportunity. It’s a mix of vertical software with Big Data with the idea that by sharing data in the cloud, you can do some things that companies with an on-premise solution just can’t do. That’s one of our key investment themes.

Another one is mobile business applications. We think that the mobile phone is now effectively a supercomputer in your pocket. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 2)

Brian Jacobs: As we learned more and more about how the cloud changes everything, we have evolved our investment thesis. We found some new areas where the cloud really does provide a new opportunity. Rather than disrupting incumbents, we’re taking advantage of the cloud to do things that we could never do before.

For instance, we knew that the social wave in the consumer world was going to affect businesses. If all of the employees and customers are on social networks, that’s going to affect businesses that try to serve consumers as well as the companies who have those workers in their midst.

We’ve invested in a number of companies that are bringing social technologies to business. We started to realize that the >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Brian Jacobs, Emergence Capital was recorded in October 2014. 

Brian Jacobs is General Partner, Emergence Capital, SaaS/Cloud domain experts boasting a fabulous portfolio, including solid exits like SuccessFactors, Yammer, and Veeva. He discusses his views on where cloud opportunities are likely to be at this point. While we’re in a mature market, he is still bullish on innovation.

Sramana Mitra: Silicon Valley seems like an incredibly arrogant place. Silicon Valley was actually afraid when the dot-com bubble had burst. You can actually feel the fear in the air. Against that backdrop, Emergence 

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