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Insight Venture Partners outbids Dell for Quest Software at $25.75 per share in cash

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Quest Software has accepted a sweetened $2.17-billion bid to be acquired by Insight Venture Partners (partnering with Vector Capital).

The buyout group offers stockholders $25.75 per share in cash. This increased purchase price represents a 33-percent premium to Quest’s closing stock price on the day prior to the initial announcement of the Insight Merger Agreement on March 8, 2012. Dell stopped its counter bid at $25.50 last week.

This transaction will be financed through a combination of a $187 million equity commitment from Insight, a $187 million equity commitment from Vector, a rollover of at least 84% of Quest CEO Vinny Smith’s existing shares and approximately $1.2 billion of debt financing commitments from J.P. Morgan Chase Bank N.A., RBC Capital Markets and Barclays Capital.

Quest has been on quite a Virtualization shopping spree itself over the last few years and unexpectedly bought their VKernel competitor in November 2011? Earlier acquisitions to enrich their management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments incluced Invirtus (2007) and Vizioncore (2008).

Below is our latest video interview with Scott Herold, Director, Virtualization Strategy at Quest Software, taken at VMworld Europe 2011. Prior to Quest, Scott was Vice President for Product Engineering at Invirtus and Director of R&D at Vizioncore.

Virtual Bridges Appoints CFO; Iser Cukierman Joins Executive Team

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Virtual Bridges today announced the appointment of Iser Cukierman to the company’s executive leadership team.

Cukierman will serve as chief financial officer where he will oversee all finance and accounting operations and provide strategic and operational leadership for the company.

Cukierman most recently he served as general manager and chief financial officer at Fiserv where he was responsible for developing and implementing the company’s strategic plan related to revenues, profitability and growth.

Before joining Fiserv, he served as CFO of Strategic Forecasting, a geopolitical analysis and professional services company. Cukierman has also held strategic finance and consulting roles at VirtualCFO, Softbank, Accenture and Ernst & Young.

Cukierman has a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Texas in Austin and is a Certified Public Accountant.

Virtacore Names Phill Lawson-Shanks As CTO

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Virtacore Systems, a provider of hybrid clouds, announced today that Phill Lawson-Shanks has joined the company as Chief Technology Officer.

During his more than 25 year career in technology, Lawson-Shanks has held a variety of strategic and practical positions.

Before joining Virtacore, Lawson-Shanks served as Board Member and Chief Strategy Officer of Nimbus Exchange. He held the position of Chief Strategy Officer at Alcatel-Lucent and was responsible for designing and deploying the company’s cloud strategy.

Whilst at SAVVIS, he led the Managed Hosting Division and was an early architect of systems that became the precursors to today’s cloud computing environment. Additionally, Lawson-Shanks spent many years with Compaq Computer in Europe and the US, managing large organizations and successfully launching numerous products and services.

Nick Lowe Joins AppSense As VP of Sales for EMEA

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AppSense, provider of user virtualization technology, has announced the appointment of Nick Lowe as vice president of sales in the Europe, Middle East and Asia (EMEA) markets.

Lowe’s responsibilities will include overseeing all sales, services and strategic alliances within the EMEA region, as well as driving additional business in new EMEA territories.

Lowe most recently was vice president of sales, EMEA at Cyber-Ark Software. Prior to Cyber-Ark, Lowe spent eight years as regional director of Northern Europe for Check Point Software Technologies. Previously, Lowe held senior positions in sales management at Sun Microsystems and Nortel where he was part of the acquisition of Bay Networks.

Lowe will be located in the AppSense London office.

He holds an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School as well as a M.A. in Computer Science from Queen’s College Cambridge and a B.S. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Portsmouth.

Nebula Appoints Dell Exec Dave Withers As SVP Of Global Field Operations

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Nebula, developer of a hardware appliance that enables enterprises to deploy large scale private cloud computing infrastructures at low cost, has announced that former Dell executive Dave Withers has joined the company’s executive team as Senior Vice President of Global Field Operations.

At Dell, Withers led the storage business in the U.S., Canada and Latin America. Withers joined Dell via the acquisition of Ocarina Networks, a storage technology vendor, where he was Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development.

Prior to Ocarina Networks, he was the Senior Director of Business Development at Isilon Systems leading up to a successful IPO and acquisition by EMC for $2.2 billion in 2010.