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David Williams - SVP, Marketing & Market Strategy - Quali

When explaining product value it’s better to focus on differentiation and results achieved. The trouble is, from a marketing and social out-reach perspective, claims of value are drowned in a tsunami of online noise and similar claims from competitors and thanks to ChatGPT the time between a differentiated new idea and parity is just days.
 

However, when it comes to Quali’s Torque platform, the proof of differentiated value is best realized when seeing and using it. The focus was always on the future state of cloud infrastructure and it is from this position that Torque was architected and developed.
 

Understandably my CEO becomes concerned when I endeavor to explain the basics of how the Torque platform works. Technical IT people want more detail and IT leaders want less – a lot less.
 

This short article attempts to hit the middle-ground. Providing a brief overview of how Torque works and how it can do what it does because once you understand the how then the why it does it and what it can do for you will become very clear.
 

After a lifetime in the IT Ops and Software Development space, it’s a rare occurrence to find something truly differentiated, especially when it coincides at a time of greatest need.  For Quali’s Torque platform the stars have aligned. IT infrastructure is insanely complex. IaC is hard to manage and scale, expertise is expensive and growing increasingly scarce, infrastructure usage is in constant state of change with AI workloads changing how cloud is used and managed. It's no longer about delivering infrastructure, it's about ensuring the infrastructure adapts to support increasingly diverse workloads.
 

To achieve this, infrastructure silo's need to be flattened, integrated and normalized allowing organizations to become agile and allow businesses to scale on-demand and keep up with the increasing demand for cloud services. Throwing more people at it will only make things worse because the problem needs addressing at the source by something that removes hybrid cloud infrastructure complexity, subsumes and leverages existing automation and uses intelligence to manage a complex cloud infrastructure issue that is only going to get worse.
 

The Problem: Traditional Infrastructure Automation Platforms Create Silos, Not Solutions
 

Cloud management platforms (CMP’s) were introduced when cloud was emerging.  These platforms are now outdated and ill prepared to deal with new and emerging infrastructure challenges. They are the ‘hot-pants’ made for Disco. An era that has long gone.
 

Do CMP’s still have a role? Sure, there’s always enough legacy to warrant continued siloed use and when this starts to dry up, the CMP’s will either get acquired by IT companies who need something that meet the needs of a specific cloud and/or infrastructure type or just fade away to a fanfare of increasingly unbelievable claims of relevance.
 

The CMP’s that remain are automation siloes demanding automation to be defined within their own platforms, assuming that every other automation system is subordinate to theirs. The result is more complexity, more skills, increased cost, more layers of administration, and more headaches for IT teams with each automation layer disconnected, creating inefficiencies, disparate policies and governance risks.  In a world of AI workloads that demand adaptive intelligence to manage them, it’s not the time to chase after them with static policies and linear automation workflows.
 

• Skills and Complexity: Each platform adds more skills requirements and complexity, which leads to higher costs and steeper learning curves.
   
• Troubleshooting and Remediation: As automation is executed without understanding the bigger picture, troubleshooting becomes a nightmare. Issues must be escalated to experts who often have little insight into what the subordinate automations are doing.
   
• Inefficient Operations: Without a holistic view, IT operations are slowed down, creating bottlenecks that impact business outcomes. This results in disconnected tools, more layers of policy, and no cohesive management structure.
   

The Solution: Full Automation Discovery and Normalization with AI
 

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) has become the heart of everything infrastructure for modern software development, empowering coders to create infrastructure as part of their software delivery objectives. The challenge is this makes it a tool for specialists, but what if IaC could be leveraged more extensively and made available to IT professionals without coding or infrastructure experience?
 

To achieve this Quali Torque takes a fundamentally different approach to hybrid cloud management, leveraging AI to automate discovery, normalization, creation, delivery and optimization of infrastructure. Rather than creating more silos, Torque fully integrates all existing automation, regardless of platform or complexity.
 

How it does this.
 

1. Discovery and Introspection: Torque discovers the existing automation across your infrastructure, using AI-driven insights to analyze the flow, optimize logic, and normalize processes into a consistent automation framework. This approach eliminates the isolated "islands" that other cloud management platforms create. 
    
2. Normalization and Grains: Once introspected, Torque standardizes automation into reusable Grains. These building blocks simplify IaC, allowing IT teams to create self-service environments quickly, reducing the need for specialized skills. AI powers this process by automating complex orchestration tasks, making the deployment of environments faster and more scalable.
    
3. Real-Time AI Execution and Drift Management: AI isn’t just limited to orchestration; Torque’s AI engine continuously monitors for drift and deviations from the desired state, ensuring that environments remain synchronized across clouds. AI-powered optimization allows real-time adjustments to improve performance and resource allocation, aligning cloud usage with business needs.
    

Democratizing IaC: How Torque Makes Infrastructure Accessible to All

One of the most innovative advantages of Torque is its ability to standardize and automate complex infrastructure through Grains, which allows organizations to fully leverage and protect their existing investment in IaC. Rather than replacing IaC, Torque consumes, simplifies, and augments its value across the entire application lifecycle.

How Torque Simplifies Cloud Infrastructure Complexity

With Torque, IT teams no longer need deep coding skills to harness IaC. By providing intuitive, AI-assisted orchestration and a self-service catalog, even non-technical users can create and access environments effortlessly. Torque’s natural language interface allows users to describe what they need, and Torque then translates those requests into infrastructure building blocks, simplifying the entire process. Torque empowers teams to deploy and manage environments without needing additional skills, ensuring that existing IaC assets are fully utilized and optimized. So, for example, IT Operations no longer need coding expertise to benefit from IaC, making it accessible to users of all skill levels throughout a DevOps practice.
 

This standardization of infrastructure is critical because, as research shows, automation works best when applied to a standardized environment. Without standardization, automation can magnify inefficiencies, leading to fragmented systems and higher costs in the long run. Torque ensures that all environments are fully synchronized and optimized in real-time, preventing the operational headaches of non-standardized environments and giving teams the confidence to automate at scale.
 

Torque AI: Simplifying Complexity
 

AI in Quali Torque goes beyond simple automation. As highlighted in a recent Medium article on GenAI in cloud management, AI offers intuitive, intelligent orchestration, reducing the need for manual intervention. AI within Torque simplifies the creation of environments by providing natural language interfaces and self-service capabilities for non-technical users, allowing them to deploy environments effortlessly.
 

This isn't just about removing complexity; it’s about enabling continuous optimization. AI automates workflows, allowing models and behaviors to adjust in real-time without impacting ongoing operations. By monitoring environments and dynamically reallocating resources, AI ensures that infrastructure is both efficient and scalable.
 

What This Achieves
 

• Crushes Automation Silos: By converting all existing automation into Grains, Torque ensures all infrastructure is standardized and reusable, eliminating the inefficiencies of isolated automation silos.
   
• Skills Optimization and Simplified Operations: AI simplifies orchestration by making environment creation intuitive, reducing the need for specialized skills and manual oversight. This means fewer issues are escalated, as environments can be created and managed with AI assistance.
   
• Real-Time AI Execution: Torque’s intelligent workflows enable orchestration, dynamically adjusting models and ensuring environments are optimized for performance, cost, and business priorities. This prevents AI models from "thrashing" as they attempt to reconcile different versions of automation. Everything is synchronized, ensuring smooth and reliable execution.
   
• Cloud Cost Management and Governance: Perhaps most importantly, Torque aligns environments with business purpose and context, allowing real-time
  optimization based on business priorities, not just resource consumption. With real-time AI insights, Torque ensures environments are aligned with business goals. This includes real-time policy enforcement for governance and real-time cost management, an optimizing cloud expenses based on real-time usage reducing unnecessary cloud expenses.
   

The Future of Cloud Infrastructure Management
 

Quali Torque is reshaping the future of cloud management by integrating AI-driven insights and automation into every aspect of infrastructure orchestration. By breaking down the silos created by traditional platforms, Torque standardizes automation across environments, ensuring that all processes are scalable, efficient, and governed. AI is at the core of Torque’s value, enabling real-time optimization and driving faster infrastructure delivery - all while improving business outcomes.

The ability to standardize, monitor, and optimize environments in real-time positions Torque as a next-gen solution for enterprises looking to scale without being bogged down by the complexities of cloud infrastructure. As businesses strive to innovate and grow, the need for seamless, agile infrastructure becomes critical, and Torque delivers just that, simplified management and powerful, intelligent orchestration.
 

Grains, the reusable building blocks integral to Torque’s architecture, help organizations transform sprawling, complex IaC and automation systems into self-service environments that are aligned with governance, cost control, and business priorities. These Grains ensure that businesses not only gain rapid environment deployment but also reduce the complexity associated with cloud operations.
 

For companies ready to simplify complexity, optimize costs, and empower their teams to deliver faster and more efficient infrastructure, Quali Torque offers a future-proof platform that breaks silos and transforms cloud management.

If you made it to here...

 The things I'd like you to take away from this are;

• Breaking Down Automation Silos: Traditional cloud management platforms create isolated silos that increase complexity, skill requirements, and costs. Quali Torque eliminates these silos by discovering, normalizing, integrating and subsuming all automation, making infrastructure standardized and reusable, leading to more streamlined and efficient cloud operations.
   
• AI-Driven Infrastructure Orchestration: Torque leverages AI to simplify infrastructure management, providing real-time insights, drift management, and optimization. With AI-enabled orchestration, even non-technical users can create and manage environments through natural language interfaces, allowing organizations to scale faster and improve business outcomes.
   
• Future-Proof Cloud Management: By transforming complex IaC systems into self-service building blocks called Grains, Torque empowers teams to deliver agile, efficient infrastructure aligned with governance and cost management. This future-proof approach enables businesses to reduce complexity, optimize costs, and deploy environments rapidly with AI-powered assistance.
   

No matter how much is written and claimed about a new technology, nothing is more valuable than just being able to use it and play with it. No obligation, and no need to provide access to anything in your organization. You will find Torque easy to understand and simple to use, two things traditional cloud infrastructure tools are not.