The Irvine, California-based application, database and Windows management specialist has already boosted its Microsoft management capabilities thanks to its $115m acquisition of Aelita Software Corp in March and is looking for rapid growth from its newly formed Quest Windows Management group.
The group brings together Quest’s performance-management troubleshooting tools for Microsoft systems management with Aelita’s migration, event log management, back-up and recovery programs. Windows management already accounted for 15% of Quest’s overall revenue, and the Aelita acquisition should push that towards 30% this year.
Quest saw Windows systems management as a very fast growing market to grow from a $300m company to a $500m company in the next couple of years, former CEO of Aelita and now general manager of Quest Windows Management, Ratmir Timashev told ComputerWire. The market is still maturing and growing really fast, mostly due to the success of Microsoft with Active Directory and Exchange.
Those Microsoft technologies, as well as the core Windows operating system, will provide Quest with additional growth as users look to migrate to newer technologies and away from Microsoft NT and Exchange 5.5, which will reach end of support at the end of 2004 and 2005 respectively.
Timashev said estimates indicate that up to 60% of Windows servers are still running Windows NT rather than Windows 2000 or 2003, while between 60% and 70% are running Exchange 5.5 or lower, rather than Exchange 2000 or 2003.
As well as the forthcoming end of support issue, Timashev said the reduced administration costs, locked-down security, patch management, policy management and enhanced email management capabilities of Active Directory, which forms the underlying engine of Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server 2000/3, were now encouraging users to make the change.
The complex move to Active Directory has previously been seen as a hurdle to customers migrating from older versions of Windows and Exchange but Timashev maintained that as well as reduced support options, management and compliance requirements will also drive migration. We help to lock down Active Directory. Compliance is about who has access to what, and who had access to what. Most activity goes through Active Directory.
The acquisition of Aelita brings together Quest’s administration, reporting and migration technologies for Active Directory, Exchange and Windows with Aelita’s recovery and audit technologies for Active Directory, Exchange and Windows, administration technologies for Exchange and migration technologies for Active Directory and Exchange.
The company believes that it now has the core components it needs to lead the Windows management market, and with 400 of Quest Windows Management’s 700 staff involved in research and development, it is also working to develop additional functionality in new areas including security management and desktop management.
While Quest is not looking to move wholesale into the security software market, as rival NetIQ Corp did via the acquisition of Marshal Software Ltd and PentaSafe Security Technologies Inc, but it is looking to make use of Active Directory for security assessment, lock down, auditing, compliance, patch management, event log and access management.
Our primary buyer is the owner of Active Directory [within the IT department] but they are working to security group requirements, said Timashev. The company also see opportunities to expand into desktop management as and when Longhorn arrives.
It’s going to be a massive change on the desktop, said Timashev, referring not only to the potential number of upgrades, but also the advances in security, file system, interface and file formats that are due with the next version of the Windows desktop operating system. In the future our plan is to move more strongly in to the desktop space with management and migration opportunities with Longhorn, he said.
