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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.

Quest Acquires ChangeBASE

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Quest Software earlier this morning announced that it has acquired ChangeBASE, a privately-held software provider based in the UK, which specializes in automated application analysis, remediation and conversion for target platforms including Windows 7 and 8, Internet Explorer 8 and 9, Terminal Server/Remote Desktop Session Host, VDI, and Application Virtualization.

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

The acquisition represents an expansion of Quest’s product portfolio that allows companies to develop a user-centric management focus for their Windows application, desktop, mobile, and cloud environments.

ChangeBASE offers an entire product portfolio that automates the three most resource-intensive processes around application migration– analysis, remediation and conversion. The products automatically test and fix applications before deployment to new or upgraded platforms, which can speed up packaging delivery by 75 percent while improving accuracy and manageability.

This solution set delivers immediate value to companies that need to assess the application suitability for deployment with their desktop virtualization technologies (Terminal Server, Remote Desktop Session Host, or VDI).

In these instances, ChangeBASE provides an essential on-ramp for adoption and expansion of Quest vWorkspace. Organizations can leverage the two solutions to rapidly assess their application estate, and determine application productivity once deployed from vWorkspace.

Quest Software Surpasses 40,000 Customers For Virtual Data Protection Solutions

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Quest Software has announced that it has reached a significant milestone in its virtual machine backup and recovery business, recently surpassing 40,000 customers.

Quest’s VM backup and recovery solutions span platforms including VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V.

More than 38,000 customers now rely on Quest vRanger for VMware backup and recovery, while more than 2,000 customers use NetVault Backup to meet their virtual machine backup and recovery needs, the company said.

The Quest vRanger product family provides scalable VMware ESX and ESXi backup, replication and recovery, and speeds VMware backup and replication while reducing storage requirements.

Quest Software Adds Virtual Desktop Connectivity For Android Tablets, Phones

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Quest Software recently debuted vWorkspace Connector for Android version 1.0.

This new connector enables vWorkspace users to securely access virtual Windows desktops and applications from Android tablets and cell phones.

The Quest vWorkspace Connector for Android provides support for Quest’s Experience Optimized Protocol (EOP) Graphics Acceleration technology, which improves the user experience when accessing applications or documents that contain a large number of detailed graphics.

Quest vWorkspace solutions empower companies to virtualize their desktop environments in ways that best meet the specific needs of their business. Patent-pending technology and extensive automation come together to deliver a remarkable user experience across a multitude of different connections, devices and locations.

Quest Software Offers Better Data Protection Suite For VMware

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Quest Software has announced the latest release of vRanger Pro, with three key data protection capabilities added:

– Integrated backup and replication, one console with flexible deployment and licensing
– Native cataloging, with integrated restore to easily locate and restore individual files
– Fibre restore: to speed recovery and eliminate LAN traffic by using Fibre Channel infrastructure

vRanger Pro also now includes all of the capabilities of Quest Software vReplicator, which gives organizations VMware protection in one easy-to-use console.

The new version of vRanger Pro features patent-pending cataloging capability that provides a native, full catalog of every image in the backup repository so administrators can quickly and easily find and restore files, even among large amounts of virtual data. vRanger Pro also now features one-step catalog-based recovery, including advanced search options and right-click recovery selection directly from the management console.

vRanger Pro 5.0 is currently available. Also available from Quest Software is vRanger Standard Edition.