- Is the Cisco MARS mission going to abort?
- First iPhone worm spreads Rick Astley wallpaper
- 10 stunning 3D buildings made with Google SketchUp
- Open source software ready for big business
- Four reasons to buy (and one reason to avoid) the Droid
A month after buying NetPro, Quest Software Wednesday said it would discontinue nearly half of its former rival's products as part of its future management platform road map.
Of the 20 NetPro products pre-acquisition, only 11 will remain available while 13 of the 14 pre-acquisition Quest products will stay on the price list. Support will continue for the canceled NetPro and Quest software until Dec. 31, 2009.
The two companies had 11 Windows management products that overlapped and Quest is planning to keep only two NetPro products while offering users with maintenance contracts a free upgrade path to the corresponding Quest software.
The only Quest product to be cut was its Group Policy Manager. Quest officials also said that its Recovery Manager for Active Directory Forest Edition would not be part of the free upgrades for NetPro users.
The depth of cuts shows just how much overlap there was between the two companies, how Quest eliminated one of its hottest rivals, and the vendor's commitment to its line of Windows management products.
One of the surviving NetPro products will live along side its Quest counterpart.
As part of its package of compliance tools, Quest will keep its own product line (InTrust) and the NetPro roster (ChangeAuditor). Quest will eventually integrate the two products into one some time after January 2010 and provide a free upgrade path for users.
Quest also plans to create a suite called the Spotlight on Active Directory Pack that will be a combination of its Spotlight product and NetPro's Directory Analyzer and Directory Troublehooter.
Quest also will create a line of tools to aid in migration between the products, including data such as log files.
The company said the product consolidation was focused on Active Directory, identity management, compliance and SharePoint.
Bill Evans, Quest's director of product marketing, says the company considered a host of factors in order to slim its product set.
"We looked at different market demands, Active Directory configuration management, object recovery, compliance, auditing, and within those customer areas we looked at the different offerings the two companies had and we compared and contrasted the products based on presence in the market, technical superiority, ease of transition, integration with other products and maintenance costs. All those different things factored in," he says.
Evans says Quest also plans to extract relevant NetPro features from each canceled product and eventually add them to the surviving Quest tools. He did not give a timetable but says it would an ongoing goal in product development.
Quest also said it would integrate NetPro's ongoing development of SharePoint tools into upcoming Quest software for that platform.
The surviving NetPro tools are its group policy management tool called GPOADadmin; compliance tools ChangeAuditor for Active Directory, ChangeAuditor for Exchange, ChangeAuditor for File Server; auditing/remediation tool SecurityManager, DS Expert for Novell's eDirectory; and MissionControl, a monitoring tool for Microsoft's Identity Lifecycle Manager.
Rss FeedRss Feed
The Leader in Network Knowledge
Partner Content
Blue Stripe Software
www.bluestripe.com/
Improving Application Performance Troubleshooting
Diagnosing why an application is slow is hard, at times taking days or weeks to isolate and resolve. This paper explains the challenges involved using current management tools, provides a 'wish list' for application management and analysis, and explains the need for an application system-wide approach that monitors entire applications, not components.
Download Whitepaper
Virtual Vigilance: Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments
This paper highlights the impact of virtualization on application performance. "Managing Application Performance in Virtual Environments" states: "Best-in-Class organizations are predominately taking actions around improving visibility across both physical and virtual systems, assessing the business impact of application performance and understanding interdependencies of applications in virtualized environments."
Download Whitepaper
Application Service Requests: The Missing Link for Pragmatic ITSM
Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell and BlueStripe co-founder Vic Nyman discuss a breakthrough approach to application problem management. Learn the new approach for ITSM problem management, which provides: Rapid isolation of application slow-downs to specific components for quick problem resolution, 24/7 monitoring for proactive notification of potential issues before end users are impacted and much more.
Register for Webcast
Comments (3)
not surprisingBy Anonymous on October 15, 2008, 8:08 pmSort of confirms that this acquisition was strictly about market consolidation. I feel bad for existing NetPro customers of those products. What customer wants to...
Reply | Read entire comment
re: not surprisingBy Anonymous on October 16, 2008, 6:27 amYes, but what a tremendous opportunity in our capitalistic society for the smaller AD tools vendors or for a new AD tools vendor to rise from NetPro's ashes.
Reply | Read entire comment
dominating the market at the cost of??By Anonymous on October 20, 2008, 9:47 pmIt is clear that all Quest wanted to do was eliminate the competition and become a monopoly. Quest's mentality of laying off quality Netpro employees who used to...
Reply | Read entire comment
View all comments