It was revealed that Dell has purchased Quest Software for a reported $2.32 billion. For those not familiar with Quest, here’s what TechZone360 learned about the company during a meeting with Matt Bolton, vice president and general manager of network monitoring, last month at Cisco Live.

Quest is 25 years old and provides software across many areas, including performance monitoring, Windows, database, identity access management, and more.

Among the products offered by Bolton’s group are Foglight Network Management System, a relatively new solution from Quest that does VoIP monitoring, providing call monitoring, mean opinion scores, and the like; PacketTrap MSP, which enables IT consultants for small businesses to manage networks remotely; and PacketTrap PSA, which is a professional services automation solution that does things like ticketing and tech scheduling, and invoicing.

Foglight NMS was one of the solutions Quest was pushing at Cisco Live. Avaya, Cisco, Shoretel are the platforms it supports. The product, which installs in less than 15 minutes, does auto discovery of network hardware, VoIP infrastructure, operating systems, virtual infrastructure, databases, middleware, applications, and services. It reduces mean time-to-resolution of network incidents; provides admin and management level visibility; and can manage up to 100 network devices for free (Quest leverages the freemium model to encourage people to try its solutions).

Quest at Cisco Live was also promoting its NetVault LiteSpeed for SQL Server High-Availability Edition. Bolton told TechZone360 that Quest is combining products with this solution, which protects remote offices with continuous data protection. He also mentioned that Quest had come out with its NetVault Extended Architecture a week before, which delivers to customers a unified console so customers can use Quest products together more easily.

When asked who Quest sees at its key competitors, Bolton mentioned SolarWinds. And when asked what differentiates Quest’s network management from the pack, he said the fact that Quest offers a suite of IT products that are very easy to use and more of which are consolidated. He added that Quest even has an initiative to make all its products look similar from a UI perspective.

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