Quest's vision

Marc Stitt and Mike Pagani, the folks driving Quest’s vision and strategy for server and desktop virtualization, respectively, stopped by to present the reasoning behind the string of recent acquisitions, how those pieces can be patched together to create a complete virtualization and cloud management solution over time, and the philosophy behind their moves.

In short, Quest is developing, partnering with other suppliers and, on occasion, purchasing those suppliers in order to build a complete tool kit to create, provision, manage and automate virtualized and cloud computing environments. Over the last couple of years, Quest has acquired athena, bakbone, celera, invirtus, monosphere, netpro,  provision networks, surgient, vizioncore,

The tool kit must be made up of easy-to-use, powerful and yet simple tools that each stand alone or can be melded together to create larger solutions. Each product in the tool kit must have a reasonable price and can immediately be put to good use once it is installed.

If one pragmatically considers the different ways a company can flesh out a complete portfolio, three different methods immediately spring to mind:

1. The company can build the technology itself — this could easily take 18 to 24 months for each product
2. The company can create a partnership so that a needed technology can be made available for its customers — this approach can mean delays creating a totally compatible environment when a new Quest product is launched
3. The company can either acquire former partner (that assures some level of compatibility from the start) or companies that offer compatible products.

Quest realizes that it often can acquire technology at a lower overall cost by starting with option number 2 and then moving to option number 3. Core strategic capabilities are always likely to be acquired using option 1.

Although Quest is a quiet company, it has made quite a success of using this pragmatic approach over the years. Their customers almost always tell me that they like the products, that they find them easy to use and powerful enough for their needs.