Quest Software Survey Reveals Improving Business Agility and Managing the Mobile Workforce Among Top Drivers of Virtualization Initiatives in 2012

Quest Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: QSFT):

Improving business agility, delivering cost savings, meeting increasingly demanding user expectations, and managing the growing mobile workforce will be the top drivers of IT spending on virtualization initiatives in 2012, according to a Quest Software survey of more than 200 organizations. In addition, more than half of the respondents surveyed indicated that at least 25 percent of their 2012 IT budgets will be allocated to virtualization projects across a broad range of critical initiatives, including backup and recovery, virtual desktops, network management, and performance and capacity management, thus highlighting the clear need among the end-user community for comprehensive virtualization management solutions.

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News Facts:

• Asked to identify the business requirements most likely to drive increased prioritization of virtualization initiatives in 2012, the need to improve business agility was cited by 61 percent of respondents. Maximizing reduced budgets was cited by 56 percent of respondents, while meeting increasingly demanding user expectations and managing an increasingly mobile workforce were cited by 31 percent and 28 percent, respectively.
• The Quest survey also indicated that a significant portion of IT budgets in 2012 will be allocated to virtualization-related initiatives, with more than half of respondents indicating that their organizations planned to allocate at least 25 percent of annual spending to virtualization projects. In addition, 40 percent of respondents surveyed indicated that their organizations would spend up to 50 percent of their IT budgets on virtualization, and 10 percent of respondents indicated that more than half of their IT budgets would be allocated to such projects.
• Respondents ranked backup and recovery as the aspect of virtualization management most important to their business, with more than 60 percent identifying it as their most critical virtualization initiative.
• Virtualization monitoring continues to be a priority, as more than 70 percent of respondents indicate they either have a virtualization monitoring solution in place today or are in the process of evaluating one. More organizations are also increasingly prioritizing their desktop virtualization and capacity management projects, with more than 50 percent of respondents stating they already have a solution in place or are in the process of evaluating one for each area.

About the Survey:

• Quest Software surveyed 235 attendees of the 2011 VMworld events in Las Vegas and Copenhagen, a cross-section of IT professionals that included both executive-level decision makers such as chief technology officers and chief information officers, as well as a broad range of end users including systems, network, database, storage and virtualization administrators.
• Quest’s online survey asked respondents to provide insight into the status of their company’s virtualization deployments across backup and recovery, desktop virtualization, performance monitoring, and capacity management, as well as their company’s virtualization priorities for 2012. Companies ranging from less than 1,000 employees to more than 15,000 across all market segments participated in the survey.

Supporting Quotes:

• Mark Bowker, senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group

"Virtualization management of both servers and desktop is quickly becoming a high IT priority as businesses virtualize more mission critical workloads and embrace desktop virtualization solutions. Quest is in a unique position with ability to deliver management solutions for both server and desktop initiatives and help companies accelerate the value of virtualization and discover improved return on its investments."

• Carl Eberling, chief technology officer, Quest Software

"The results of this survey reinforce what we’ve been hearing from customers recently, that implementation of virtualization across servers and desktops has moved from proof of concept to production environments. As this has occurred, customers now fully realize the complexity involved with managing the overall environment. Now more than ever before, IT needs a complete management solution set that lets them leverage this dynamic environment for the good of the business, giving them the agility and responsiveness they need to properly address their powerful and ever-demanding users.”

Supporting Resources:

• Quest Software, Inc.: http://www.quest.com/
• More Quest news: http://www.quest.com/newsroom/
• Twitter: http://mobile.twitter.com/quest
• Facebook: http://www.quest.com/facebook
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/
• Quest TV: http://www.quest.com/tv/

About Quest:

Quest Software (Nasdaq: QSFT) simplifies and reduces the cost of managing IT for more than 100,000 customers worldwide. Our innovative solutions make solving the toughest IT management problems easier, enabling customers to save time and money across physical, virtual and cloud environments. For more information about Quest solutions for administration and automation, data protection, development and optimization, identity and access management, migration and consolidation, and performance monitoring, go to www.quest.com.

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