Companies looking to harness the power of digitization, focus on IT modernization architectural transformations-means to get there. These include moving to private, hybrid or public clouds, focusing on DevOps, application modernization, strengthening cyber security and other such initiatives. A lot of responsibility is placed on the dev/test teams – the innovators – to make these transitions happen. “Quali is geared towards helping Dev/Test organizations to innovate faster, increase productivity while lowering costs,” begins Shashi Kiran, CMO at Quali.

Based in Santa Clara, CA Quali focuses on enterprise software for Cloud and DevOps automation. Cloudshell, the flagship software product offered by Quali, adopts a blueprint-driven approach to deliver cloud sandboxes, which are on-demand self-service environments. These blueprints can authentically represent production deployments and expose to dev/test teams to give them holistic access to real-world production-like environments. This way, developers and testers are allowed to collaborate better and faster, while also avoiding quality issues that might arise later should they were functioning in silos, or were working only on certain features.

Quali is unique in its ability to model, orchestrate and deploy a complete stack (physical and virtual infrastructure, applications, data, test and performance tools and service APIs) gives tremendous advantage to customers to drive automation even in legacy or brownfield environments which can positively impact speed of digital transformation by enabling an environment that can be built and managed via an elegant GUI or be completely manipulated by REST APIs, it lends itself to integration into established IT administration as well as non-disruptive seamless integration into DevOps toolchains. “A fairly unique capability of these sandboxes is they are cloud agnostic, i.e. they can be deployed onto any cloud of client’s choice (public or private) with a ‘one-click’ deployment path selection.

Quali is geared towards helping organizations to accelerate the architectural transformation to cloud and DevOps in a seamless way, combined with reduced risk and lower cost

This allows them to re-use blueprints and port them across different clouds significantly lowering time, cost and effort of multi-cloud application migration” Kiran points out. Today Quali supports several clouds including VMware vCenter, AWS, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack. It also can work with bare metal clouds. Its extensible approach makes adding other cloud options very quick.

The pricing model for CloudShell is based on the number of active concurrent sandboxes. It provides customers the flexibility to have as many components as they require within a sandbox. There are two versions of the product–CloudShell VE and CloudShell Pro. While the former is mostly for virtualized environments, the latter is involved when there’s physical infrastructure and on-premise deployments. Quali also offers professional services and delivery, directly, as well as through its channel partners and system integrators. The company mostly offers subscription pricing, with many of the customers signing up for multi-year subscriptions.

Quali addresses different use-cases. Lab automation is one of the distinctive use-case the company serves, in which a lab is converted into a cloud and delivered as a service. There are variants of this such as cyber ranges for security, SDN/NFV labs, demo labs, POC, training and certification labs. Another vital use-case pertains to private, public and hybrid cloud rollouts; where Quali enables the client to build the current and target cloud environment (including the interconnectivity between clouds), and accelerate as well as de-risk cloud adoption. As it relates to the DevOps lifecycle, Quali solutions seamlessly integrate with existing DevOps tools to help with continuous testing, integration, staging etc. with a full fledged business intelligence and analytics offering.

Quali already has integrations with multiple DevOps tools such as Jenkins, Travis, Ansible, CA Automic and several others, with plug-ins available for many of them. Quali maintains a leading position in the industry by maintaining a global customer footprint with over 300 customers and with a low churn rate. These include public cloud providers, tier-1 and tier- 2 service providers, telcos, technology vendors and large enterprises, among which many belong to the Global 100 and the Fortune 500. Recently, the company is gaining traction with banking and financial services institutions winning multi-year subscription deals where the productivity increases the client got by bringing in CloudShell meant the three year subscription paid for itself within the first 12 months. Quali also has customers like Pure Storage, Gigamon and Juniper, who use Cloudshell for sales acceleration demo, training and POC clouds. These companies are now able to radically improve their sales effectiveness or training or customer support with Quali clouds. Likewise, clients like Cisco and Huawei were able to undertake massive outreaches to developers and build large scale developer communities with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, unleashing new vistas of innovation with Quali CloudShell.

Quali has a very creative go-to-market approach. “We are continuing to expand our channel footprint as well as integrations with several technology ecosystem partners. Our intent is to have the majority of our business expand with global channel partners and ISVs. We also have opensource the ability to model Shells and have a lively developer community with contributions from Quali, our customers and partners. As we introduce new product offerings the routes to market will also vary accordingly,” says Kiran. “In this age of information overload, one of the constant challenges as a start-up is to figure out how to rise above the noise especially hyped up areas like cloud and DevOps. As a marketeer that is also an exciting opportunity,” says Kiran. Speaking on the way forward for Quali, he says, “I am very optimistic and excited about the future for Quali. If we play this right, the year ahead is one of growth, scaling and expansion. The entire team is quite motivated to help our customers scale new heights” Kiran concludes.