Feyzi Fatehi more than decade ago set out to recreate Intel Corp.’s business model for the software industry.
He had a backstage pass to the Santa Clara-based chipmaker’s meteoric rise—fueled by the advent of the core processor—during a 14-year stint leading global channels and alliances at Hewlett-Packard’s Silicon Valley headquarters in nearby Palo Alto.
Intel’s technology led to the proliferation of a generation of PC builders across the globe.
Fatehi’s Aliso Viejo-based Corent was established in 2006 to set the pace—like Intel did with the central processor—in automated software migration. Its technology allows developers and enterprises to quickly and easily move their products to a subscription service via the cloud or a web portal.
Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturer, for example, used its software to migrate some 1,000 applications to the cloud, including one of the industry’s most sophisticated chain logistics applications.
“We didn’t let the small setbacks discourage us, and today we have it,” said Fatehi, who was honored with a Business Journal Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award during a March 8 luncheon at Hotel Irvine (see profiles of the other winners, pages 6, 8, 9 and 10).
The company’s cloud application management service, SurPASS, is billed as a way to trim years of research and development, speed up time to market, and reduce or eliminate engineering costs and maintenance for customers.
“We can help someone very quickly move to the cloud, and when they are on the cloud, help them become sophisticated service providers,” Fatehi said.
That message appears to be resonating with hundreds of companies.
Corent, a word play on core enterprise, has Boeing and IBM among its major customers.
Corent also has key relationships with Google, Dell, Amazon, Accenture, Cisco and Intel, all big names when it comes to cloud-storage capacity.
120 Workers
Strong demand has led to steady employment growth at Corent in recent years. It now has about 20 workers in Irvine and 120 globally.
The company doesn’t discuss revenue figures, but a trio of recent deals involving competitors indicates a lucrative exit could be in the cards.
Redwood City-based Oracle Corp. last month announced it had acquired Ravello Systems in Palo Alto, which develops tools to run enterprise applications in public clouds. Media reports pegged the price tag at $500 million for Ravello, which does not disclose revenue, either.
Fatehi contends Ravello Systems’ key offerings provide about 20% fewer applications than Corent’s product, which also generates more annual revenue.
A month earlier, AppDynamics, which was contemplating an initial public offering, agreed to a $3.7 billion sale to Cisco Systems Inc.
The San Jose networking equipment giant about a year ago announced a $260 million deal for CliQr Technologies Inc., a privately held cloud service provider billed as enabling customers to model, deploy and manage new and existing applications to any cloud and data center.
Fatehi estimates that CliQr’s technology covers about half of Corent’s offering.
Corent, unlike other tech companies in its position, has raised only $17 million to date and hasn’t taken institutional funding, instead relying on private investors—many in OC’s executive ranks—as well as board members and its own employees, primarily in management.
“Why not take the money from the source rather than going through the middle man,” said Fatehi, who earned his industry stripes at HP, where he worked from the mid-1980s to the heart of the dot.com bubble.
Fatehi was one of five inventors of the first “Real-Time Database” at HP, which was 1,000 times faster than the database developed by Oracle at the time. He also invented a new methodology for software development, published and promoted by IBM and HP and used by major technology companies, including Bell Labs, Telecom Italy, Napster and Google.
Fatehi said he hopes to mimic that success at HP with Corent, his fourth startup in Silicon Valley and Southern California.
“We have a global spotlight on us, which is kind of good,” he said.
