Feyzi Fatehi, CEO of Corent Technology
Feyzi Fatehi is a technology visionary, inventor, innovator and entrepreneur. As a Silicon Valley veteran, he serves as the CEO of Corent Tech – named among The Top 10 Most Disruptive Private Companies in 2018. Feyzi who studied at Cambridge, Princeton, UT Austin, and UCLA, has given talks at Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, CalTech, and at industry events around the world, including a popular keynote titled “Inspiring a Culture of 10X Innovation and Entrepreneurship within the Global Corporation.” Feyzi serves as an advisor to the UCLA Anderson School of Management, UCI School of Engineering/Computer Science, and the Beall Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. As someone who is a NAUI certified Scuba diver, has climbed Mt. Whitney multiple times, backpacked in Alaska and High Sierras, and won a tennis tournament – Feyzi is optimistic that one day he will bring his golf handicap score to a non-embarrassing level!
Corent Technology is a leading innovator in the Cloud Migration and SaaS-enablement technology space. Corent’s SurPaaS® Platform is used by key enterprises, IT consulting firms, and Cloud Providers to enable rapid discovery, analysis, optimization and migration of software applications to the cloud, and optionally, automated transformation of software applications to fully instrumented SaaS through Corent’s innovative “Software Defined SaaS® Platform,” without any programming. Corent is managed by a team of Silicon Valley veterans from HP, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Oracle, and VMware among others. Learn more at https://www.corenttech.com/
Rhianna Collier: Tell me about Corent Technology, Inc.’s mission.
Feyzi Fatehi: Corent’s mission was inspired by a bold vision of becoming the “Intel Inside” for the software industry and to “democratize SaaS” the same way that Intel democratized the PC industry. Corent’s ability rapidly enables software applications into efficient, scalable and fully instrumented SaaS, transforms software vendors into SaaS Providers, without the usual re-engineering, consuming the scarce time and capital resources. Corent’s SurPaaS® Platform (a.k.a Software Defined SaaS® platform) that is used by global enterprises, system Integrators and cloud providers, enabling the end-to-end cloud migration journey. (The name Corent stands for CoreEnterprise and was devised by a Corent advisor who was involved with the creation of the original Intel inside campaign!)
Rhianna Collier: What were you doing before you joined Corent Technology, Inc. as CEO?
Feyzi Fatehi: I somehow managed to disrupt my 14-year increasingly successful career at HP (that spanned from engineering, to managing global alliances like SAP,) to join a small start-up at its initial formative stage in 1999 with a goal of creating the ultimate SaaS “aggregation” platform. What we discovered was that transforming software applications into efficient, scalable, fully instrumented SaaS was a huge undertaking. After finishing business school, and a couple of start-up successes (and failures,) a number of friends and colleagues and I became fascinated by the idea of helping address the SaaSification problem to remove a major industry bottleneck. That led to Corent with our mission of Democratizing SaaS.
Rhianna Collier: How did you get your start in the technology industry?
Feyzi Fatehi: Since I was very young I fell in love with solar energy. And that led me to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering with emphasis on Thermodynamics, Heat transfer / Solar and renewable energy from UT Austin. When I graduated, the tax incentives to help the young industry were eliminated leading to sudden decline in the growth of Solar industry. With the encouragement, help and support from a good friend, who was a genius UT computer scientist, and used to hang with Michael Dell and other disruptors on some futuristic project, decided to get my MS in Software Architecture (that I also fell in love with) and that led to my combining my mechanical/solar/software background as a unique and attractive package to be hired by HP in Silicon Valley as a member of the Pegasus team – a team of five that invented the first real-time database called HP RTDBMS (HP Real-time Database Management System.)
Rhianna Collier: What are your goals for the next 5 years? Where do you see yourself and Corent Technology, Inc.?
Feyzi Fatehi: To be the standard global “go-to” platform for Cloud Migration and SaaS-Enablement of Software the same way that Intel became the platform of choice for the computer industry. Corent could be either an stand-alone successful tech visionary leader or alternatively a division, a subsidiary, or a Joint Venture partner of a key global player – such as one of our strategic partners - in the industry.
Rhianna Collier: Give us your TechTip of the month.
Feyzi Fatehi: While I could be philosophical here, and give some generic / general advice, let me be brutally tactical and pragmatic: If you are in the Software/SaaS space, AND have an entrepreneurial attitude (i.e. have positive, enthusiastic, can-do/ success-oriented mindset) I invite you to become a founding member of the new “Software to SaaS” revolution. Pick a favorite Open Source software application you like, (or even better you love!) drop us a note at info@CorentTech.com as to why you would like to be a highly successful SaaS industry leader, and given you are credible and convincing, we will transform your favorite Open Source software into a fully instrumented SaaS within days, ready to go to market, and will join you to support and celebrate your huge pending success. This is a technology-enabled business model disruption and you could be one of its founding entrepreneurial leaders in the “Software Defined SaaS” revolution, the same way that my UT school mate, Michael Dell decided to become a leader in the PC revolution, enabled by the then-emerging “Intel-inside” business model.
Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA. Follow the Software team on Twitter at @SIIASoftware.