Feyzi Fatehi, CEO Undoubtedly, cloud transformation has become the new norm for enterprises today—making IT more economical, secure, and manageable than ever. A recent IDG Enterprise report entitles cloud technology as the staple to an organization’s infrastructure, with 70 percent of companies already having at least one application on the cloud. However, there seems to be a dearth of user-friendly single platform for software vendors to effectively execute their migration to the cloud, including shifting software workloads and managing a range of requisite operations. Even after the migration, the next step of enabling software to be delivered as scalable, efficient SaaS is an arduous task. An early appreciation for the impact that the cloud model and SaaS is going to have on the software industry spurred Corent Technology to innovate on this key market challenge and enable the concept of ‘Software Defined SaaS
®’—defining and provisioning software applications as fully instrumented SaaS in a configurable and re-usable way. Taking a leap from the prevalent market stance, Corent Technology went a step further to transform the cloudified software applications to a highly efficient multi-tenant SaaS, without having to re-write it—thus making the applications dynamically configurable as SaaS (Software as a Service) based on business activity rather than the infrastructure.
"Whether an application is ‘born in the Cloud’ or is migrated to the Cloud, SurPaaS rapidly transforms it into a fully instrumented SaaS, on any Cloud, and without any programming"
Corent’s proven platform, SurPaaS
®, rapidly analyzes software applications to rank and rate their suitability for the cloud. “The integrated software platform automatically scans, analyzes, optimizes, migrates, manages, and optionally ‘SaaSifies' software applications,” explains Feyzi Fatehi, CEO at Corent Technology. “Whether an application is ‘born in the Cloud’ or is migrated to the Cloud, SurPaaS rapidly transforms it into a fully instrumented SaaS, on any Cloud, and without any programming, “he adds. In other words, a fully Multi-Tenant SaaS application where any organization—be it Systems Integrator, MSP, CSP or ISV—can use any cloud infrastructure in the world to provide the required SaaS capabilities for any software application.
The concept was further expanded to a spectrum of ‘tenancy models’such as Virtual Tenancy, Hybrid Tenancy in addition to Multi-Tenancy, easing the transformation process for legacy software to the SaaS model. This concept of ‘SaaS-enablement’ or ‘SaaSification’ that is now commonly used terminologies in the industry was the driving vision for Corent. “We have also introduced another term to the industry, 'Private SaaS' to describe how organizations can leverage the SaaS model for the enterprise and the extended enterprise for delivery of the service to internal divisions and business units and external suppliers, and channel partners,” states Fatehi.
A Unified Platform for Cloud & SaaS Transformation
SurPaaS’ scans through the binaries of the application stacks to discover the underlying components and their topologies, which are used to present a slew of reports on cloud migration possibilities and compatibility.
Corent’s Private SaaS model allows CIOs to leverage the efficiencies of the SaaS model to transform their IT organization from a traditional cost center into a profit center
With the addition of information about the databases and data stores, the platform creates a series of Cloud Plans that are designed to meet specific migration goals such as scalability, redundancy, performance or cost. “It also enables applications to be monitored and metered at the business transaction level to provide greater insight, and the metered data can be captured, quantized, and if desired, rolled up into billing information,” says Fatehi. With the current cloud migration trends pointing towards an increase in the use of Cloud PaaS, SurPaaS’ has the capability to incorporate these services into its proposed migration Cloud Plans™. The platform can also migrate applications between clouds, which mitigates a concern about ‘lock-in’ that could occur with the use of proprietary cloud services. "For this, we offer our SurPaaSMaaSTM (Migration as a Service), a configurable, customizable SaaS service that can be used by SIs and MSPs as a cloud migration enabling platform,” he adds.
Furthermore, it allows customers to choose or even customize a Cloud Plan according to their needs. “SurPaaS enables us to automate the implementation of these Cloud Plans so that, when put into action, the automated migrations will be oriented towards the goals of achieving more scalability, redundancy, or even migration to a different cloud,” elaborates Fatehi. Basically, the platform works along with the client’s chosen cloud, acting as a secure software service delivery platform, bringing the scalability and cost effectiveness of cloud to the organization by analyzing, optimizing and migrating software on the cloud infrastructure in a manner that enables it to take advantage of the flexible cloud infrastructure.
During any migration process, customers rely on the scanning and analysis of applications, the reports generated with SurPaaS helps in explaining and quantifying costs, determining priorities and aligning business objectives with migration deployment topologies and plans. “Having the ability to add their own private clouds to the mix via the SurPaaS Cloud Knowledge-base, and consolidate costing information for the IaaS/PaaS components with the value added services and initial consulting fees acts as the main element in getting migration projects approved and implemented,” he adds. Fatehi also credits the platform’s ability to manage the customers’ application portfolio from analysis through to implementation and subsequent monitoring as the key in providing the comfort level and risk mitigation for IT business. “And the unsung feature of SurPaaS is that it does its work for not just one application, but in a consistent way for all the applications that an organization migrates or a SaaS provider offers,” he further adds.
Cloud Migration Made Easy
SurPaaS’s ability to interact with the Cloud is the key technology that helps to automate the provisioning, deployment, configuration, monitoring, and metering of an application’s activity. “The platform does this through the use of a, dynamic, configurable, adaptive, and self-learning cloud knowledge base and by extending the patented methods embodied in the multi-tenant server engine. It has the ability to scan and identify key patterns of application components from their binaries, and uses its’ pattern library to manipulate how an application interacts with its data,” describes Fatehi.
As industries move to cloud or SaaS model, the independent software vendors are being forced to become SaaS providers in order to survive. In this scenario, SurPaaS provides all the SaaS operations, commercial and management capabilities as a unified capability. This makes the transition from Software Vendor to SaaS Provider significantly less expensive and risky. It crucially allows software vendors to focus on their product development, leveraging their core expertise and value proposition, and not have to develop all the ‘as a Service’ capabilities needed for SaaS. “And now we are extending that idea of lowering the expense and risk to the migration to the SaaS model by looking at the initial steps of getting the software onto the cloud. This cloud migration a journey— allowing SwiftShift™ or SmartShift™ migration options, so that the customer can make their transition faster and be focused on their business objectives,” states Fatehi.
In one instance, Samsung was looking for a SaaS-enabling technology for its supply chain logistics solution, Cello. The main requirement was to deliver an efficient and secure access to various software applications to their divisions, partners, suppliers, and vendors. “They were looking for a solution that would not have to incur the tremendous overhead of setting up and managing separate systems for each of them,” recalls Fatehi. Within a short span of time, Corent enabled the Samsung supply chain application as a fully Multi-Tenant solution in the Private SaaS model, able to be used by the client's multiple divisions and partners while maintaining the security and isolation of their data. Similarly, Corent was instrumental in the SaaS-enablement of Bluestripe, the data center performance management software, which was then acquired by Microsoft weeks after it was transformed into a fully instrumented SaaS solution using SurPaaS.
Pioneering Private SaaS
Being a pioneer in offering Private SaaS, Fatehi feels that the potential of the market is still untapped while most of the enterprises opt for sophisticated solutions that are tailored to a particular industry. “Corent’s Private SaaS model allows CIOs to leverage the efficiencies of the SaaS model to transform their IT organization from a traditional cost center into a profit center, by offering their corporate software assets and licenses to all departments, and potentially to partners and other customers ‘as a Service,’” he further explains.
At its innovation lab, Corent is looking to invest more on patented methods to make the transformation to SaaS model rapid, effective and efficient. “And we extended that thinking to define Private SaaS because we envisioned that the SaaS model can be equally applied to the internal enterprise entities as well,” asserts Fatehi. One of Corent’s aspirations is to facilitate and inspire the culture of 10X innovation within the enterprise. “So it is not only what we at Corent invent, but also how we can boost our customers’ability to carry on the innovation journey, on their own,” explains Fatehi.
On its futuristic vision, the company is currently enhancing the capabilities of SurPaaS for managing the operations of applications in an effective and competitive fashion. “So our SaaS-Ops capabilities are being enhanced to enable any application to be managed and operated in highly efficient manner, like a SaaS application,” signs off Fatehi, who simplifies the secret of Corent’s success to three things—bright people, innovative products, and genuine partnerships.
