Jul 18

Written by: Tyler Jewell
7/18/2008 12:20 PM

Every quarter at Quest, we go through a series of business reviews with executive management.  Each business unit prepares a summary of the business, key findings, and action plans for the coming quarter.  We take three full days to review each business individually with stakeholders representing a cross-section of the company from R&D to sales to PSO to finance and everything in between.

We concluded our reviews at the end of last week and wanted to share some non-confidential findings that were summarized about Foglight in this quarter’s review:

1. The number of accounts with a Foglight system installed has crossed the 1500 threshold, which is significant growth YOY.
2. We added approximately 15,000 CPUs of systems that are now being managed by Foglight.
3. We have tripled the number of reference accounts on record.
4. With the exception of JBoss coming in August, we’ve completed conversions of all F4 cartridges to support the F5 architecture, released a set of migration services, and enabled the F4 customer base to begin migration planning and consideration.
5. We had three releases within the quarter that brought global federation, revamped the dashboard framework to support multi-persona, multi-value prop dashboarding, incorporated a number of security features to support federal guidelines, and enabled the more than 250 Quest Management Xtensions adapters to feed their alerts and data directly into Foglight.
6. The Foglight virtualization capabilities are a winner.  Released only at the beginning of Q2, we did over 100 Foglight virtualization transactions in the quarter.
7. We held three Customer Advisory Board meetings (1 phone, 2 face-face) with key representatives from global organizations to discuss the direction of Foglight and our customer’s vision. We introduced Foglight 5 to thousands of organizations by attending a series of high visibility conferences, performed an analyst / media tour, released Foglight.org, revamped our Web site and demo technology, and provided briefings for our customer base.
8. APAC and Latin America are hot regional sectors for Quest.  Developing economies and limited in-region competition have been factors that have given us abnormal growth in these regions.

Here are some of our key findings and areas of improvement going into the 2H of the year:

1. More Market Awareness Needed.  Foglight is a winning product and our global sales team is superb in competitive scenarios.  To supercharge our growth, we need to be competing in many more opportunities without diluting our effectiveness.   From our experience in the last year, We are working off the theory ‘people who see it, want to buy it.’  Along these lines, we’ll be working on product, packaging, and marketing activities that will help generate awareness.  This includes creating versions of Foglight that can be downloaded for evaluation, versions that are packaged for niche roles, enabling Foglight to operate within a virtual appliance to lessen installation and configuration costs, creating a “mini Foglight” mode that uses fewer services with a smaller resource footprint for quicker activation, development of a “Dashboard Catalogue” profiling the dozens of service solutions that are possible, and consideration of wiki-izing and publishing Foglight documentation.   
2. We Will Invest More In Virtualization.  With our current virtualization solutions a bona fide hit, we need to more rapidly expand our solution to include sophisticated chargeback mechanisms, analytics and what-if modeling for consolidation, VM sprawl lifecycle management, storage virtualization support, HyperV support, and guest process drill downs.  We’ve now got plans where the bulk of these capabilities will likely be in the market THIS year. 
3. Some Aspects of Foglight Need Simplification.  When evaluating historical support cases, interviewing sales reps, and doing post mortems with customers, there are a few aspects of Foglight that need “finishing” work.  This includes incorporating more automation for enterprise deployments with >500 systems (discovery, templating, grouping), creating tooling to make custom dashboard creation for power users joyful (right now we do a great job for basic users and engineers), improve the visualizations associated with executive SLAs, create unified database models across the heterogeneous platforms and our Performance Analysis solution, provide more out of the box reports, and simplify server-generated audit reports so customers can connect actual usage against licensed quantities. 

We’ve been through a couple of phases with Foglight 5 over the past few years:

1. Design and acceptance.
2. Initial release, stabilization, and scalability proof.
3. Large scale deployment and reference account acquisition.

We are now past all of these “proving” stages.  Quest feels like we are now sitting in a growing market with a killer product that has been proven in competitive and edge case scenarios.  We have a stable base of satisfied customers, and the global field expertise to replicate this success.  We are now moving into the “execute like mad” phase where the only thing stopping us from acquiring market share is finding ways to get our offering in front of as many eye balls as possible.  And when it comes to “executing like mad”, Quest is pretty good.   We are expecting some great things to happen over the coming years and are bullish on our prospects. 

Copyright ©2008 Tyler Jewell

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