|
Corestack |
|
|
August 6, 2018 Issue |
||
|
CEOCFO MAGAZINE |
||
|
|
||
|
Passionate about making cloud technology easy to consume, Corestack has developed a Multi-Cloud Governance Platform enabling Enterprises to manage Cloud Operations, Consumption, Compliance and Cost |
||
|
Founder & CEO
Corestack
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – August 6, 2018
The CoreStack founders believed that for Enterprises to truly realize the flexibility and benefits that cloud computing may offer, they will need a solution that empowers them to optimize and utilize their cloud resources to the fullest while ensuring corporate policies and compliances are not compromised.
Years before AWS and Azure (around 2005) were born, when Akamai in CDN and Sales force in SaaS domains were perceived as leading cloud companies, I was building a large-scale cloud system in the hospitality industry. The successful delivery of this complex cloud framework-based platform, led me to drive best practices and contributing to building Microsoft Azure from its alpha stage in 2011 to its transformation into a billion-dollar revenue generating platform and then building regional private clouds for China and Australia. This was an enriching experience. Customers are and continue to be excited about adopting cloud for business agility and innovative service delivery. However, we also witnessed the challenges that emerge in a hybrid environment where the cloud has to co-exist with traditional technologies and interface between providers. Customers often find themselves overwhelmed by the learning curve of using rapidly emerging technologies, the myriad of government compliances and security regulations.
The founding team was passionate about making cloud technology easy to consume. There were products available on the market that provided targeted solutions to challenges in cost optimization, migration, assessments, security, compliance, and interoperability with traditional technologies but we had the vision to create an intelligent platform that leverages the best in class interoperable cloud technologies, while encompassing rich feature sets for optimization and the guard rails of governance resulting in the genesis of CoreStack in 2014.
CEOCFO: What have you created?
We have created a multi-cloud governance platform that propels enterprises on their cloud journey irrespective of whether they are using on-premise, public cloud, private cloud, containers and/or server-less services. Through this platform, enterprise users can easily govern and manage the four pillars of cloud computing - Cloud Operations, Consumption, Compliance, and Cost.
With CoreStack’s cloud operation feature sets, our goal is to make it as simple as driving a car. For driving a car, one does not need to know how various parts of cars work with each other. Similarly, CoreStack platform abstracts all the operational complexities and offers transparency to users to automate the dynamic inventory of cloud resources and manage the day to day operational tasks efficiently with highest automation.
For CIOs and CFOs, cloud spend is the primary concern. The CoreStack’s Cost Analytics dashboard provides deep insights with built in predictive analysis that are based on the current and past cloud utilization and related spend. The platform enables continuous optimization through our ML based recommendation engine for infrastructure rightsizing and capacity planning.
Our self-service catalog ensures that the provisioning of resources is easy with automated workflows for approval and the guardrails ensure adherence to compliance standards. Development teams get the right-sized resources to accomplish their tasks without having to labor through complex workflows to spin up and manage fine-print resource configurations.
CoreStack also provides proactive policies that continuously monitor for security vulnerabilities, generate alerts and provide remediation recommendations. An inherent risk for any enterprise while migrating to a newer technology is the loss of compliance. Our platform gives firms the ability to continue to maintain or achieve higher levels of compliance while adopting newer technologies, which on its own does not provide the compliance that is expected by the customer.
CEOCFO: Does the world know they need a better way? Are people ready for CoreStack?
Yes! The more enterprise customers we speak to, the more the need for CoreStack is validated. Many customers have a very similar set of challenges, ones we are adept to solve. A source of major concern among enterprises is the possibility of a vendor lock-in with cloud providers. As a workaround to this issue, they tend to diversify across multiple cloud platforms. Our unique value proposition is the fundamental freedom of choice we provide as part of our platform to the customer. Vendors may convince a client to build applications using them and their technologies. However, that results in getting locked in, on a higher level within a brokerage platform rather than a core technology platform.
Modern applications teams should have the flexibility to choose the application languages, runtimes, and the backing services that they require. With technology changing rapidly, developers should not be limited in their choice based on the service requirements of the past. CoreStack provides a truly agnostic capability with a middle tier that is not bound to any technology limitations for customers.
CEOCFO: What is involved with implementation of CoreStack?
We currently provide CoreStack Enterprise as a product offering and support multiple public and private cloud providers. The platform enables visibility into the hybrid infrastructure of enterprises and can integrate with their existing workflows. CoreStack can be hosted on-premise or can govern through their enterprise cloud subscription. We’re one of the few providers that doesn’t require customers to use proprietary tools and code. We built CoreStack with open-source technologies including Heat templates and Mistral workflow services from OpenStack. Git is also part of our platform, so customers who host their workloads on GitHub can deploy them to Azure and integrate tools such as Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Jenkins, Nagios, Logstash and more (for functions like infrastructure automation, CI/CD, monitoring and logging services).
Onboarding customers to the CoreStack platform typically takes two to three weeks. Our technical team provides them with support during day one and we also provide ready to use guides. From there on, it would take anywhere between one to four weeks to take action based on recommendations and completely realize the value proposition that CoreStack has to offer.
CEOCFO: When companies start to use CoreStack what are they surprised that they can do? What can be done better now or have more insight into when they start with CoreStack?
With our early customers, there has been an overwhelmingly positive response around the ease of use, reduction in complexity of governance and increased efficiency of teams. One of our recent wins have been for a large Financial Services company in Asia region that manages various investment and insurance securities as an escrow at national level across banking providers. Customer was making their first ever move to public cloud, co-existing with their traditional services, without losing any of their compliance certifications, keeping their TCO lower and not hire new work-force to implement newer technologies as part of their digital transformation initiative. This increase in efficiency with tremendous reduction in their cloud spend is making their digital transformation execution flawless.
An online education customer was having significant dependency on their IT teams to manage the technology backend for online learners looking to consume courses on big data, data science, blockchain and AI. The lead time for providing services to students was close to two weeks. In addition, the customer was looking to scale up their services from their current portfolio of 1000 students across 10 countries. Within 10 months of implementing CoreStack, students are able to enjoy on-demand, 24X7 available technology labs without dependence on IT teams. The customer has expanded exponentially and currently serving 15000 learners across 150 countries.
Validation from our customer success stories encourage us at CoreStack to keep innovating and believe in the influence of our product.
CEOCFO: Would you tell us about becoming a ISV partners with various leading Cloud Providers?
CoreStack platform is a cloud agnostic platform. What that means is we can help enterprises to continue to leverage their cloud tools and cloud providers as we natively communicate with them through our patent (pending) platform.
Having said that we are listed on Microsoft Azure Marketplace and are also the technology partner for AWS. We are one of the first set of Cloud based ISV’s for selling through Microsoft’s CSP/MSP/Resell partner ecosystem which is focused on helping cutting edge technology companies, such as ours, get to the next step with respect to customer/partner tractions and providing technology-based support when needed. We have earned our status of being the Co-sell ISV partner for Microsoft as well.
Partnering with Microsoft through these programs help us validate our solution in the global marketplace with large enterprises and large SI partners. With our partnership with Microsoft, Enterprises have greater confidence in us and in the value of our solution. We contribute by creating differentiated values for Azure/AzureStack while seamlessly connecting other cloud providers and cloud technologies that Enterprise users may already be using outside of Azure, thus making it efficient for Enterprise users to leverage without any disruptions.
We will continue to expand our Microsoft partnership and will also look for opportunities to partner with other industry leaders such as AWS and emerging providers such as Google and Oracle.
|
“CoreStack platform is a cloud agnostic platform. What that means is we can help enterprises to continue to leverage their cloud tools and cloud providers as we natively communicate with them through our patent (pending) platform.”- Ezhilarasan Natarajan
Corestack
Recent News
|
|
|
disclaimers |
||
|
|
||
|
Multi Cloud Orchestration, Corestack, Multi Cloud Governance Platform, Ezhilarasan Natarajan (Ez), Passionate about making cloud technology easy to consume, Corestack has developed a Multi-Cloud Governance Platform enabling Enterprises to manage Cloud Operations, Consumption, Compliance and Cost, CEO Interviews 2018, Technology Companies, Global Company, Cloud Cost Optimization, Multi Cloud Management, Cloud Management System, Hybri-d Cloud Management Platform, Cloud Orchestration Platform, AWS Cloud Management, Azure Automation Solutions, Cloud Compliance Management, Cloud Operations management, Azure Cloud Management, Corestack Press Releases, News, blog, twitter, facebook, linkedin, google plus, youtube |
||
|
|
||
Ezhilarasan
Natarajan (Ez)
