Quest Software looks up to Cloud

Quest Software has been widely known and acclaimed for its product, Toad. But how would you define Quest Software in a few lines?

Quest is a 25-year-old company focused in database management, administration and automation, application management, Windows management and virtualization management. There are six distinct solutions areas for the customers, including our migration solutions. Just like Toad is very familiar with a lot of people, our migration tools are equally in demand among our customers.

We have done more than 35 million migrations for users, like migrating active directory to exchange, Lotus notes to exchange, or Lotus notes to share point. We are the largest ISV partners for Microsoft, providing solutions on the top of the Microsoft products so that customers get more value out of their investments.

Same is the case of Oracle and VMware, where we extend their products like in performance monitoring and optimization or administration. We fill the 20 per cent that is typically missed out by OEM, in providing a horizontal product.

How diversified is your portfolio? You also have a few open source offerings...

We provide a lot of tools for multiple platform. Toad is an acronym for Tool for Oracle Application Development. Today Toad is available for Oracle, SQL server, Sybase, DB2, Mysql and cloud databases. So customers need not re-learn the management tools. For MySql, we provide the tool for Mysql as a freeware. We also provide a solution called Mysql Spotlight, which users can download and monitor.

In open source, we have our own community. We do not contribute to Linux kernel; we are more in providing solutions on the top of the base platforms and that's where our specialty comes in.

You meet a lot of CIOs, what according to you are the top CIO priorities now?

First and foremost question that a CIO asks is about reducing the down time of the applications and optimizing their availability.

The second would be server consolidation. A lot of our customers have already done it, a few among them are still looking for it. But now the trend has moved to next level, where companies are looking at server virtualization.

For many forward-looking companies, the priority moved from deploying to management — how do I manage that infrastructure. In desktop virtualization, a lot of companies are showing interest and testing water in it, but they are yet to see major deployments in this regard.

Another critical area, which I see, is optimization of their infrastructure. Almost all solution comes with pre-configured options. Over a period of time, they need to keep optimizing with solution.

CIOs talk about virtualization, but real adoption reports a different view. Why is there a gap between the demand and deployments?

Consolidating server and virtualization is internal. So most of us have crossed this stage as an activity. But are they ready to take it to the Cloud, which is outside the network? It may take some time.

In that, hybrid cloud will be the prime factor; customer will inherently have the apprehensions that my data is on the public cloud. Adoption of hybrid cloud would still see some adoption but moving to the public cloud will take a longer time.

Lastly, what are the long-term plans of Quest Software?

From the perspective of where we are looking down the line is providing customer solution in complete cloud platform so that they leverage on resources and also provide internal private cloud. Another area we are looking at is providing desktop virtualization, so that they get desktop-as-a-service that can be available for customer within an organization, and also offering it to the service provider who can virtualize it over the network for SMBs, who typically are not willing to make capex investment. We see that desktop virtualization would see higher acceptance in the SMB segment for these factors.