With over 25 years of experience in the software industry, Lanir Shacham holds the distinction of building a company from scratch and leading it towards success. Originally the Founder & CEO of Correlsense, during the company’s initial years, Lanir went on to shoulder the position of a CTO and supervised Product Management and Customer Relation roles at the company. He developed channels and partners to expand Correlsense’s presence within the market and three years ago he returned to the CEO position to help the company expand globally.
A Portfolio worth Boasting About!
Prior to the inception of Correlsense, Lanir was one of the senior members of the IBM Global Technology Unit. His responsibility, back then, involved generating technical and business relations with the Israeli Hi-Tech community. Moving further back, Lanir served as the Chief Architect and R&D Manager at Indocs Online, a start-up company that developed unique services for the pre-print industry. He also served as an officer in the IDF Intelligence Corps, wherein Lanir led the development of Big Data systems of Knowledge Management. His educational resume includes a BSc in Computer Science and MSc in Physics from Bar-Ilan University and graduate of the MAMRAM IDF Computer Academy.
The Inception of a Big Idea from a Simple Question
While working as a performance consultant, Lanir kept trying to help IT organizations solve hard performance problems. It was obvious that there was no answer to the question: Why is this user transaction hanging? Lanir incepted Correlsense to bring-forward a relevant answer to the above question.
But as with any other companies, the road wasn’t a bed of roses. Lanir and his team of experts started working on a solution ten years ago, but the challenge existed for at least ten years prior to that time. Owing to the diverse and complex application environment, the challenges were enormous. There was no solution out there that could trace single user transactions across multiple technology types to monitor enterprise data.
The company invested four years to just get to the stage where its software agents could attach themselves to any type of technology that created transactions automatically. Following that, Correlsense focused more on how to capture all of that data in an effective manner, so that it could be analyzed, indexed, and collated – all in real-time. The company as a result efaced a Big Data problem, which it started working on during2010, and completed the task three years later.
Visibility into Every Single User Transaction
The concept behind Correlsense is to give organizations visibility into every single user transaction that lies within their applications — Application Performance Management (APM) — and this is what constitutes its vision, mission, and core technology. Lanir rightly points out, “We enable organizations to accurately answer the question: ‘How are my applications performing?’ by giving them information on each and every user click.”
Correlsenses’ main investment goes into the technology behind its flagship product, SharePath, which gives organizations both a bird’s-eye and detailed view of how transactions are performed across multiple tiers in their data centres
Qualities that Separate an Entrepreneur from the Crowd
Lanir mentions that an inherent passion for technology, persistence and an acute understanding that it takes a loyal team of professionals, who are smarter than you, translates a dream into a reality for any entrepreneur. The most important part of it is finding and keeping hold of a winning team.
Talking about his own contributions and entrepreneurial traits, Lanir exclaims, “When things crumble you have to be able to see the light, be the captain of the ship and take charge. This is what your employees and shareholders expect from you. I saw no other option for myself, as an aspiring engineer this was the only thing I wanted to do. Also you have to be determined and calculated working in small steps that lead you to your ultimate objective.”
Envisioning a Future that Reaps Positive Results
Correlsense has always been at the forefront of innovation in its market. The company was the first to introduce java script’s automatic injection at the web-server level, enabling customers to measure real user experience as opposed to synthetic monitoring, which was common until a few years ago. Correlsense was also the first to introduce a whole new concept of binary interception, and only now a few other vendors are trying to reach this level of granularity, usually with less success.
Looking ahead, Lanir is excited with what the future holds for the company and plans to innovate and bring new ways of managing the performance of large-scale data centers into the market.
A Fruitful Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Lanir concludes with his advice for emerging entrepreneurs by stating, “You have to really enjoy what you do and be passionate about it. Things for certain will not develop as you planned; you will need to overcome constant obstacles – and as an entrepreneur, this is not a cliché – look at them as opportunities to grow your business and yourself.”
