Everybody is expected to do more with less now

What is Quest Softwares value proposition for the enterprises?



Quest is an important player in the area of IT automation, which is

traditionally called IT systems management. We help enterprises manage,

automate, and extract performance out of the IT infrastructure. We provide

products that sit on the core Windows infrastructure, and the products helps

manage and derive performance out of that. This is the largest and the fastest

growing stack of Quest Software which is directly linked to the popularity of

Microsoft platform. The second stack, called database management, offers similar

value and it was the first offering from Quest. The third stack is of

application management, which provides performance, tuning, and diagnostic

capabilitieson either out of the box applications like PeopleSoft, Siebel,

Oracle E-Biz, or custom applications built on .Net or Java. The fourth area is

of virtualization. One could virtualize the environment but there are some

management challenges like performance that remain. We have some offerings and

are constantly working towards building it up.

How are enterprises managing their IT today?



Today, most of the enterprises are using semi-automatic or manual method for

managing their IT environment. This is changing dramatically because the cost of

people is very different. Larger organizations are looking at management and

monitoring as a one-time cost rather than having people to manage them. The

other area is report. Most organizations are doing it in an ad hoc manner,

resulting in waste of time and resources. This can be automated, which will go a

long way in streamlining the report creation process.

What would be the impact of IT spend cut that most enterprises are

contemplating on companies like Quest?



Organizations where IT is a strategic tool will see far less cut than

organizations which look at IT as a cost element. Organizations will become more

conscious about implementing a particular technology from the strategic

viewpoint, where it will increase revenue, customer satisfaction, productivity

or efficiency. Everybody is expected to do more with less now. The only way

organizations could do this is through increasing productivity, and one of the

ways is through automation which can help them move in that direction.

Ironically, I see an opportunity in this slowdown for organizations to revisit

some of the things they were doing to extract more value.

Sudesh Prasad



sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in