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NetVault and vRanger will become plug-ins to QUDP, Maxwell said.
"Quest is the only company to allow customers from the smallest to the largest to use the same technology, or to grow their technology as their business grows," he said. "Symantec? They have Backup Exec and NetBackup, and those two don't talk to each other."
Walter Angerer, senior vice president and general manager for Quest's data protection business, said that by going with a platform approach, Quest makes it easier to protect customer and partner investments in data protection as customer data grows.
"For partners, once the platform is in place, the customer learns one set of problems and how to configure protection, and will not have to retrain," Angerer said.
Maxwell also said that Quest, with its planned enhancements to its data protection software, is ready to help its solution providers differentiate themselves from the competition.
"Let's be frank," he said. "Do you want to be just another Symantec reseller? That's a commoditized offering, and maybe gives you 7 or 8 percent margins."
Quest, on the other hand, has invested to heavily in helping partners be successful.
For instance, thanks to investments in demand generation, about 60 percent of vRanger sales come from the 30,000 search engine hits the software gets every months. "We are getting the word out to the market that we are a viable vendor to work with," he said.
Quest is also investing heavily in partner training, which Maxwell said is important as more of the data protection business goes to virtualized environments and the cloud.
"If you don't know what a VMDK or ESXi or other acronyms are, you need to learn," he said. "Some other reseller out there knows what they mean."
Maxwell said that Quest also knows that it is still a relatively small competitor when compared to companies like Symantec and EMC, and so it is developing strategic partnerships with other vendors to address more opportunities.
For instance, he said, Quest is one of two data protection software vendors to tie its dedupe software with EMC's Data Domain dedupe hardware appliances. "So if a customer chooses a hardware centric approach to dedupe, we'll support it," he said. "If they want a software approach, we'll provide it."
Angerer said that if a customer is set on buying Data Domain, a Quest solution provider should not fight the choice.
"Such a customer wants a high-end solution," Angerer said. "But on the other hand, we provide a great dedupe solution. If the customer buys Data Domain, it is not looking at a lower-cost alternative. So don't fight them."
Nicolas Heisdorffer, enterprise technology sales manager for Alliance Technologies, a Des Moines, Iowa-based solution provider and Quest Software partner, said he is impressed at how the vendor is folding its NetVault data protection software in with its other products.
"Two years ago, we asked Quest to help us with a unified message about its products," Heisdorffer said. "And now they're doing it. It's all about taking a complex environment and adding simplified technology around it."
Quest has become the largest $800 million company no one ever heard of, Heisdorffer said.
"Quest is building a great story around data protection," he said. "It's taking what can be a complicated problem, and solving it by bringing data protection, deduplication, and continuous data protection together into a solution."
Next: Quest For A Complete Solution
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