Quest Software Buys Surgient; Preps for Private Clouds, IaaS 
Quest Software aims to bring its smart systems management portfolio to the private cloud, with its purchase of Surgient Inc., a privately held secure private cloud automation software firm. The deal sets the stage for a new vision for secure private cloud architectures. Move comes as IDC predicts private cloud market will top $1 billion by 2014.
Quest Software aims to bring its smart systems management portfolio to the private cloud, with its purchase of Surgient Inc., a privately held secure private cloud automation software firm. The deal should close this fall.
The Surgient Automation Platform is designed to lets organizations quickly deploy and manage secure cloud infrastructures to improve business processes and cut costs. To date, Surgient has more than 60 customers with 160 successful deployments.
Quest’s move into the private cloud market comes as International Data Corp. (IDC) predicts the private cloud market for workload management and automation could rocket past $1 billion by 2014.
IDC also released a survey that found nearly three-quarters (73%) of all organizations are “evaluating, planning or have already implemented” private cloud strategies. In fact, the study’s author suggested that private cloud options are becoming “a fundamental requirement” for businesses.
Quest's Foglight application monitoring software and Vizioncore virtual infrastructure management offerings, together with Surgient’s private cloud automation technologies will offer customers “a number of key private cloud data center management building blocks,” according to Mary Johnston Turner, IDC research director for Enterprise Systems Management.
"Increased use of virtualization and plans for private cloud data centers are creating the need for dynamic workload migration and system provisioning solutions that can react to real time application and business service performance requirements,” Turner said in a statement.
Inside the Quest/Surgient
Private Cloud Initiatives, Portfolio
Quest CEO Doug Garn said the company wants to help its virtualization management software customers improve their implementation with more efficiency and with automation, where appropriate. He said Surgient is the right acquisition for that goal.
“Since 2003, Surgient has developed an impressive array of patented technologies… When the acquisition is complete, our customers will have the platform they need to not only quickly implement private cloud infrastructures, but also support them effectively with the best management solutions in the industry.” Garn said in a statement.
Surgient’s Private Cloud offerings currently include:
Surgient offers a configurable cloud automation platform that allows IT and business users to design, build, automate and manage secure (IaaS) infrastructure-as-a-service private clouds to deliver IT services across an enterprise.
Surgient’s Virtual Automation Platform optimizes the IT Service Delivery process through dynamic resource provisioning and heterogeneous infrastructure management. The flexibility and extensibility of the platform enable IT and business users of all types to create private, infrastructure-as-as-service (IaaS) clouds to support a wide range of business functions.
Surgient Platform seamlessly integrates with existing data center infrastructure to provide customers
- Fully automated delivery & recovery of complex IT services
- Policy-based self-service infrastructure delivery with guaranteed reservations
- Dynamic infrastructure capacity management & resource allocation (cloud pooling)
- Scalable, elastic services
- Proven enterprise scale with 150+ deployed enterprise clouds
- Capabilities to prevent or eliminate VM (virtual machine) sprawl
- Rapid implementation in less than 30 days
"When the acquisition is complete, our customers will have the platform they need to…quickly implement private cloud infrastructures [and] support them.”
Doug Garn
CEO
Quest Software
Surgient also offers three specialized ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions on top of the core platform, including:
I. Development, Test, and QA Clouds
Enable enterprise development, test, and quality assurance (QA) organizations to accelerate the application lifecycle and reduce costs. Centralizes pre-production infrastructure and automates the deployment, configuration and teardown of complex software environments.
II. Online Training Clouds
Enables organizations to deliver resources for self-service training programs tailored for business or IT users. Automates the setup, provisioning and teardown of environments for self-service learning and/or training programs.
III. Online Demonstration and Proof-of-Concept Clouds
The Surgient Demo Solution is an enterprise application to centralize and simplify the creation, management and delivery of prepared, online software demonstrations and software evaluations to employees, customers and partners, in a true self-service manner.
