Ali was one of the first SICSA sponsored PhD students, graduating in late 2012. During his research Ali studied the challenges that companies face when making system deployment decisions in public clouds; and developed tools to help them investigate the costs, benefits and risks of doing so.
Towards the end of his PhD, Ali co-founded PlanForCloud.com, a cost forecasting tool for cloud computing which helps users estimate the cost of deploying their systems on the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Compute Engine. PlanForCloud was then acquired by RightScale in July 2012 and continues to grow.
Ali commented of his experience of being a SICSA student: “For me, SICSA was much more than just funding; during my thesis I went to numerous workshops around Scotland, helped organise SICSA student conferences, demonstrated my work to others during DemoFest and got to know many other PhD students”.
Since graduating Ali has continued to dedicate some of his time to SICSA and was involved in the SICSA PhD Conference 2013 as an industry panel member.
