We are a premier sponsor of the event, and used it as our platform to launch Foglight 5 to the market. See press releases here, here, and here. This event is only the beginning of our launch activities. Expect to hear more from us in the near future about the results of our Customer Advisory Board, ability to do a broad range of integrations, announcing a series of major account wins, and for us to unveil our plans around predictive analytics, cloud computing, managed hosting providers, and download-and-go Foglight.
This sort of conference presence is unusual for Quest. At our core, we are an R&D company. We support our 1100 engineers through a diversified, multi-channel sales force that spends a large amount of time being consultative in their interactions with accounts. If you are an account that has regular interactions with our sales reps, you tend to find that we provide great value and support for you on a wide range of products. But, if you aren't familiar with Quest, which we've found most organizations aren't, we don't tend to do a large volume of awareness marketing to make you familiar. We've tended to believe that customers with the most difficult problems will be able to seek out Quest through word of mouth, search marketing, or exposure to other Quest products that you've had a great experience with.
But Foglight, and any sort of enterprise platform play, is very different. Foglight as an application performance management solution can be considered part of the IT environement, not just a monitor in it. This means that it needs to be stable, it needs to scale, it needs to be secure, it needs to have low overhead, and - unless its being used as a niche solution - it has to be implemented across many teams. And implementations that involve multiple teams require managers (and their managers) to feel as good about the technology as their administrators do. Value propositions, ROI, competitive perspectives, enteprise support, company reputation, and company demographics suddenly become factors in the determination and evaluation of vendors.
We have a great reputation amongst technologists in the industry. Those who have used Quest products tend to have a great experience with them. Same holds true for Foglight, though admittedly much more so with our F5 platform. Now that we've gotten 1500 customers working on Foglight, we've begun to help existing customers transition from F4 to F5, and our PSO organizations can point to a number of successful large scale and SMB implementations the biggest barrier we now face to growing our business is market awareness. We've seen so many people investigate F5 and have an "ah ha" moment about 90 minutes into their evaluation. And that moment is when everything clicks and the true value of the architecture we've built becomes apparent. We believe that if we can get the masses in IT to have exposure to F5, they will all be having "ah ha" moments, and then we'll be seeing something special happen in IT.
And thus a major marketing push, our presence here in Las Vegas, a brand new Web site, plans to unveil a major portion of our roadmap, launching of Foglight.org, and the release of a bunch of new demos. This is an exciting time for Quest because awareness marketing of this degree is not inherently in our DNA. But given the success we've already had this week at the show, the relationships we've started to establish, and the positive (and truthfully some negative) feedback we are hearing, I have a feeling that the corporate marketing DNA of Quest is beginning to change.
Tyler Jewell, Sr. Dir, PM