Quest Software, like former sister company SonicWall, officially has new ownership and a new CEO. Dell sold the IT management company to Francisco Partners and Elliot Management in mid-2016, and the deal closed in recent days.
The private equity firms have hired Vertafore and Attachmate veteran Jeff Hawn as CEO. From here, Quest will focus on expanding its IT and cloud management portfolio solutions. The developments will include on-premises and SaaS solutions. The company's core focus areas will include security, IT and cloud management. Flagship products include:
- One Identity, offering a portfolio of modular and integrated solutions for identity governance, privileged management, access management and identity as a service
- Toad (a tool for database professionals), Spotlight (provides monitoring, diagnosis and SQL Server optimization); and SharePlex (a database replication and near real-time data integration solution).
- Migration Manager, Recovery Manager for Active Directory, Change Auditor and a number of other solutions that help customers migrate, manage and secure data across Microsoft platforms.
- Foglight performance monitoring solutions for applications and databases.
- KACE endpoint systems management appliances, which enable customers to provision, manage, secure, and service network-connected devices.
- Statistica, a predictive analytics software platform; and
- Rapid Recovery, which enables customers to protect systems, applications and data across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
While many of those offerings are quite popular, Quest Software faces intense competition from cloud-first upstarts like AppDynamics, Datadog and New Relic. Each of those fast-growing companies offers application performance monitoring and/or infrastructure monitoring. Moreover, AppDynamics and New Relic will hold customer and partner conferences later this month in Las Vegas and San Francisco, respectively.
Quest Software: Balancing Direct, Indirect Sales
Channel partners will play a key role in the company's overall business strategy -- though the company will also have direct sales activities.
Sources say the company has been taking a particularly close look at MSP-centric opportunities. Many MSPs, after all, are seeking next-generation IT monitoring and management tools for physical, virtual, on-premises and cloud workloads. But there again, upstarts like AppDynamics, Datadog and New Relic also are building service provider partner programs. Moreover, Quest must also counter MSP-friendly software companies like SolarWinds.
According to a prepared statement, the Quest Software sales strategy will include:
"working closely with channel partners across all areas of the portfolio, as well as enabling a global ecosystem of system integrators to assist in deploying Quest solutions like those from the identity and access management and Microsoft platform management portfolios. This will provide customers a choice to work either directly with Quest or with a trusted partner of their choosing."
Still, details about the partner strategy were generic in today's announcement. We'll be digging for updates.
