Quest Software's CTO, Carl Eberling, on Virtualization & VKernal

Here's a second snippet from Bruce Hoard's interview with Carl Eberling, discussing how recently acquired VKernal expands Quest Software's virtualization management offering. To read Carl's views on the exciting new capabilities that ChangeBASE adds to the Quest Software portfolio, please check out yesterday's post.


Virtualization Reveiw: Turning to Quest's acquisition of VKernel, what attracted you to them, and how will that acquisition impact your customers?

Carl Eberling: With VKernel, we had recently rolled out some new capabilities for capacity management. When we looked at VKernel, we felt like it could accelerate what we'd already planned even further. We were pretty excited about it, because we had been looking at them for some time, and that' the quick summary.

Again, how customer-driven was that?

Eberling: That was less customer-driven than it was strategy-driven. About a year and a half ago, we laid out a strategy where we were looking at not only the capabilities that exist in a comprehensive performance management solution, but also ways we could officially deliver both point solutions as well as enterprise platforms.

How do Quest and VKernel benefit by selling vFoglight and other products -- say relating to capacity management -- to vSphere customers?

Eberling: We knew there was going to be multiple hypervisors. We're starting to see it now pretty aggressively across customers, especially since the last pricing change on the VMware side. We're finding more Hyper-V in the dev and test environments -- maybe not production yet -- but certainly more of a mix in the datacenter, and what Quest with vFoglight and VKernel offers is the ability to manage and capacity-plan across hypervisor environments, and we're also adding additional support for hypervisors like (Citrix) Xen and KVM as well.

Do you think Quest is competitive enough against VMware to draw new virtualization users away from them and to you?

Eberling: Yes, absolutely. I think it's all about our focus. When it comes to systems management, we have a rich history of success over 20 years. I love to ask people if after they provision their environments, do they just turn them over to their end users, or are they layering in applications and building something that is a utility for end users? When you look back at our history, you can see that we didn't start making a hypervisor, wake up a couple years later, and say yes we also want to be a systems manager. From the beginning we said it's how technology is applied and how it's put to use for the end user that's really important.

You guys claim to be the leader in virtualization management. How do you define virtualization management?

Eberling: We use third-party validation mostly. IDC has put out stuff in the past couple of years that said we are number three in virtualization management -- we're the first ISV, but that they list us right behind VMware and Microsoft in this space, so that's how we claim our title as leader in systems management. In addition, we put a lot credence in the feedback we get from our customers.

Going forward, what specific goals must Quest meet to thrive as a company?

Eberling: We've got several initiatives that span our solutions. Last year we embarked on an effort to really educate both our companies, and even our employees in some cases, about the general solution area that Quest participates in. We've got this rich portfolio of a hundred and some products, and nobody could ever know them all. People generally relate to a smaller set of solution areas, so we settled on six solution areas, which is great. Now, as we go into 2012 we're looking at things like identity management and access management along with end-user workspace. These are things that certainly can be entire platforms, but they also can be point solutions if the user is wondering, how do I get that one application or point solution in place to solve the problem I have today, and then how do I also leverage that to build for a better tomorrow? 


For more information how Quest's ChangeBASE solution set makes getting your applications ready for deployment on a virtual infrastructure simpler, faster and less costly, please visit the website.