Yesterday Dell and Quest Software announced they have entered into an agreement for Dell to acquire Quest Software. Dell recently announced the formation of the Dell Software Group, intended to build upon the company’s existing software expertise, but at the same time add to Dell’s enterprise solutions capability. Adding Quest, an award-winning IT management software provider, might just be the perfect thing to help Dell accehive it’s goal to accelerate strategic growth, and increasing the current solutions portfolio with Dell-owned intellectual property.
Under the terms of the agreement, approved by the board of directors of both companies, Dell will pay $28 per share in cash for each share of Quest for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $2.4 billion, net of Quest’s cash and debt. The transaction is expected to close in Q3, subject to customary conditions and Quest shareholder approval.
With it’s diversified software portfolio, Quest Software generated $857 million in global revenue based on its fiscal year 2011. They support heterogeneous and next-generation virtualized environments across leading platform vendors and adding Quest, including its 1,500 software sales experts and 1,300 software developers, to Dell’s existing software expertise in systems management, security and cloud integration, can be the start of something big.
The acquisition provides important components to expand Dell’s software capabilities in systems management, security, data protection and workspace management. The Quest’s family of software solutions and key technologies are strongly aligned with Dell’s software strategy and highly complementary to the companies scalable design approach to develop solutions that scale with customer needs.
Some examples include:
- The Quest One Identity and Access Management solution family adds to Dell’s very strong set of security assets with SonicWALL and Secureworks, creating a comprehensive set of security solutions to address important customer needs.
- Quest’s Performance Monitoring solutions for applications, networks and databases address a rapidly growing need for our customers. Industry analysts have consistently ranked Quest Foglight as a leading application performance monitoring solution. Businesses of all sizes are looking to reduce their IT complexity and automate workloads for their IT departments. Customers worldwide leverage Foglight to continually monitor their IT environments, proactively identifying and remedying performance issues before they become bigger problems.
- Quest’s Windows Server Management solutions complement Dell Services’ rapidly growing application modernization practice with recently acquired Clerity Solutions and Make Technologies.
- Effective database management is critical to the successful operation of most organizations. Quest’s Database Management capabilities offer a strong complement to Dell’s enterprise offering. Today, millions of DBAs, developers, and analysts around the world rely on Quest’s database management tools to simplify their work.
