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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.

VKernel Releases New Capacity Management Suite (CMS 2.0)

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VKernel, provider of Capacity Management products for virtualized data centers, has announced the general availability of VKernel Capacity Management Suite 2.0 (CMS 2.0).

VKernel CMS integrates previously separate products from VKernel with additional capabilities to create the most powerful integrated suite for capacity monitoring, planning, optimization and chargeback for enterprise environments.

Tapping into capacity management experience with over 500 customers including Global 2000 organizations, CMS 2.0 contains significant improvements in scalability, analytics, and automation while still providing a simple to download, simple to deploy, fast time to results application suite.

From a pure performance standpoint, CMS now scales to support the federation of multiple vCenters. In addition, by integrating previously separate products onto a single appliance, CMS reduces the load on connected vCenters by over 60%.

But scalability encompasses more than technological performance. As the number of VMs analyzed by an application increases in scale, the application must maintain its original usability despite the added complexity of more data, more users, and more analytical complexity. CMS contains multiple improvements to enable scalable operations as both the number of VMs and users within a company increase.

In addition to scalability improvements, CMS 2.0 contains improvements to the core capacity analytics engine. These improvements include the usage of storage throughput data in capacity calculations, support for thin provisioning, customizable virtual machine models for space availability calculations, selectable memory metrics, and new capacity change history analysis. The addition of these calculations to the capacity analytics engine provides system administrators with:

  • More accurate capacity planning that includes storage throughput
  • Awareness of over commitment caused by thin provisioning usage
  • Capacity planning forecasts based on application specific VM sizes, not a default, one size fits all model
  • Memory usage modeling customized for particular application characteristics
  • The ability to compare specific VM parameters to determine what has changed or will change over a given time period

Finally, CMS 2.0 contains new automation capabilities. As the number of VMs scale into the hundreds, organizations find it increasingly difficult to regularly evaluate and correct resource allocations for virtual machines. CMS has the ability to selectively reclaim unused resources at the push of a button or on a predetermined schedule.

Reclamation rules can be applied to further restrict which resources are automatically reclaimed. Only through this selective automation approach can organizations realistically improve ROI on a large scale. And only through this automation can VM system administrators gain additional time in their day.

In addition to improvements in scalability, analytics, and automation, CMS 2.0 contains a new product offering: VKernel Inventory 1.0. Inventory indexes all VMs in an environment and allows system administrator to sort, filter, and view all information about a VM from a single pane. Installed as part of Capacity Management Suite, Inventory provides value within 20 minutes from download by automatically indexing all VMs in an environment, serving as the historical record of VM configurations, allowing a single point of reference for all information about a VM and providing robust on-the-fly reporting abilities.

VKernel Capacity Management Suite 2.0 is available immediately for purchase or free 30 day trial. Products integrated into the suite include Capacity Analyzer 5.0, Optimization Pack 2.0, Chargeback 2.0, and Inventory 2.0.

Pricing starts at $299 per socket.

VKernel Introduces New Optimization Pack

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VKernel Corporation has announced the new VKernel Optimization Pack to help organizations achieve maximum ROI from their virtualization projects.

VKernel’s new Optimization Pack includes three powerful applets, Wastefinder, Rightsizer and Inventory, that help users improve the efficiency of their virtual infrastructures. The new applets allow organizations to run more virtual machines (VMs) with the same hardware, maximize the utilization of infrastructure resources, reclaim terabytes of wasted storage, reduce VM sprawl and assure optimal VM performance.

A successful virtualization project balances proper resource allocations and utilizations with VM performance and cost per VM. With the Optimization Pack, VKernel enables organization to rapidly achieve their goals by providing a very affordable and simple-to-use toolset. Delivered as a virtual appliance, deployment is instant and users immediately begin solving their critical needs. The VKernel Optimization Pack includes three powerful management applets:

  • Wastefinder – quickly finds where resource capacity (CPU, memory, and storage) are being wasted in the virtual infrastructure. By identifying zombie VMs, expired snapshots, and other wasteful consumers, users can reclaim expensive capacity to optimize virtual environments and achieve a better, faster ROI.
  • VM Rightsizer – a simple tool for tuning your VMs with the right amount of resources (CPU, memory, and storage) to drive maximum VM densities without impacting performance. Rightsizer is unique in its ability to make recommendations and automatically implement changes to find improperly allocated resources and optimally configure VMs.
  • Inventory – automatically collects important information about all VMs in the virtual infrastructure and creates a detailed inventory report showing VM name, created by and when, resource allocations, and much more. The inventory is continually updated to match the dynamic environment and is searchable by different criteria to quickly find specific information.

VKernel currently supports VMware ESX and vSphere and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V (later this year) as well as Citrix XEN Server. The company believes that a heterogeneous capacity management and optimization offering will be increasingly important as the enterprise virtual infrastructure becomes a mix of hypervisor platforms.

The VKernel Optimization Pack is currently available in a bundle with Capacity Analyzer 4.1 for $399 per CPU socket including the first year of maintenance and support. Subscription pricing is also offered at $179 annually per CPU socket including maintenance and support.

VKernel Adds Support For VMware’s vSphere 4 Platform

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VKernel has announced that its complete product suite fully supports the VMware vSphere 4 platform. VKernel products complement vSphere 4 and deliver advanced capabilities and functionality to enhance performance of the virtual data center and achieve a faster return on investment.

The VKernel suite of virtual server health and optimization tools solve a number of critical data center challenges impacting IT staffs today. Delivered as a VMA (Virtual Management Appliance), VKernel software instantly deploys and is simple to use to maintain the health of the data center and optimize resource allocations — reducing operational and capital costs and delivering a superior ROI. VKernel currently supports VMware ESX and vSphere, and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XEN. The company’s current products include:

  • Capacity Analyzer — proactively and predicatively monitor shared capacity resources to prevent current and future problems and optimize the environment
  • Chargeback — provide instant cost visibility and implement a chargeback processes
  • Modeler — quickly test and validate additions and changes to see the performance impact on the environment before going live
  • SearchMyVM — free “Google–like” search utility quickly finds information in virtual environments
  • CompareMyVM — a free community website tool allows visitors to exchange and compare virtual machine (VM) resource allocations with that of the community at large
  • SnapshotMyVM — free tool that completely automates the time–consuming process of documenting the virtual data center

Industry Moves: VKernel Taps Kevin Conklin For VP Product Marketing Role

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VKernel Corporation today announced that Kevin Conklin has joined the company as vice president of product management and marketing. A 30–year high–tech industry veteran with proven success in the development and implementation of strategic marketing programs and communications, Conklin comes to VKernel from his most recent position as vice president of marketing at Mazu Networks.

During his tenure as vice president of marketing at Mazu Networks, Conklin was focused on repositioning the company to take advantage of its unique market differentiators. In one year, his efforts led to a 50 percent increase in quarterly revenue resulting in Mazu’s acquisition by Riverbed Technology. Previously, Conklin was the chief marketing officer for SMARTS where he led an effort to refocus marketing messaging and expand channel and partner programs. SMARTS was acquired by EMC.

He was also the executive vice president of marketing and business development for Concord Communications which was widely recognized as the market share leader in a field of over 20 network management vendors. Concord was acquired by CA.

VKernel Scores $7 Million Series B Round

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VKernel Corporation, a provider of easy-to-use and quick-to-deploy virtual server management and optimization solutions, today announced it has closed a $7 million Series B round of funding. The latest round was led by Longworth Venture Partners and joined by prior investors Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners. The new funding will be used to accelerate sales, marketing, and product development efforts to capitalize on the rapidly growing server virtualization management market.

The VKernel suite of next-generation virtual server management and optimization solutions is designed to solve real world data center challenges that are impacting IT departments. VKernel leverages the virtual appliance format to instantly deploy its products for enhancing performance, lowering operational and capital costs, optimizing virtual environments of all sizes, and delivering instant ROI. Currently, VKernel supports VMware ESX and plans to support Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XEN, and others. The company’s current products include:

  • Capacity Analyzer — proactively and predicatively monitor shared capacity resources to prevent current and future problems and optimize the environment
  • Chargeback — provide instant cost visibility and implement a chargeback processes
  • Modeler — quickly test and validate additions and changes to see the performance impact on the environment before going live
  • SearchMyVM — free “Google-like” search utility quickly finds information in virtual environments
  • CompareMyVM — a free community website tool allows visitors to exchange and compare virtual machine (VM) resource allocations with that of the community at large
  • SnapshotMyVM — free tool that completely automates the time-consuming process of documenting the virtual data center

Nilanjana Bhowmik, Partner at Longworth Venture Partners, and Doug McNary, the former CEO of Onaro (acquired by NetApp in 2008) and past executive vice president at Motive and Tivoli, have joined the VKernel Board of Directors.