Hacienda's Foglight Acquired by Quest Software

By Jay Hipps, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

Deal Valued at $125 Million May Lead to Expansion

In a deal that closed the first week of January, Quest Software has acquired Hacienda's Foglight Software for 1.3 million shares of stock. The transaction is valued in the range of $125 million.

Foglight, which currently employs 45 in its Hacienda offices, is best known for their Real-time Application Performance System (RAPS) software, which allows e-businesses to keep critical computer systems online by monitoring and adjusting them to ensure optimal performance. For Foglight customers such as eBay, Discover Brokerage, and Cisco Systems, RAPS plays an important role. The product is also what attracted Quest to Foglight initially.

"We believe that Foglight Software's RAPS uniquely addresses a critical need within an organization for proactive management of today's rapidly expanding e-business and e-commerce environments," says Vincent C. Smith, chairman and CEO of Quest Software. "Our acquisition of Foglight and their RAPS technology will expand Quest's production support suite to include a fully integrated e-business monitoring and management solution. As with all of our products, RAPS is designed to deliver immediate value to our customers."

Quest already offers a variety of applications and utilities in the e-business and enterprise computing markets which occupy a similar niche to RAPS.

"It's a very complimentary acquisition it's not eliminating any of their products, it's adding to their product line," says Dan Callahan, Foglight's president and CEO. "They have a series of products that are used around e-business assurance and information availability, so they sell to a lot of the same kinds of customers we would sell to with different types of products that would compliment ours. It's more of a 'one plus one makes three' argument there are definitely economies of value."

"Quest Software and Foglight Software share an understanding of the key issues and requirements for ensuring availability and optimal performance from e-business and enterprise applications," adds Gal Bar-or, co-founder and chief technology officer of Foglight. "Quest is a known leader in the application availability market. The combination of Quest's and Foglight's products will be an even more compelling offering for organizations that require 24x7 availability and high performance from their application and e-business systems."

Foglight's flagship product, RAPS, consists of several elements. The first is a series of "lightweight agents," small software routines that measure a variety of network conditions. These agents send their measurements to a "correlation engine" that interprets these readings to determine the status of the entire network at any given moment. The software then evaluates this information, which may include hundreds of thousands of factors, and can either react to changing conditions before human intervention is required or send out e-mail or page personnel if the situation demands it.

Making the application even more flexible is the fact that RAPS is a Java-based application. This gives RAPS the ability to run on computers that use a variety of operating systems, including Windows NT and Unix, two popular platforms for Internet and enterprise servers.

Callahan says that the final positioning of Foglight's products have yet to be determined by Quest.

"We're just going to let Quest help direct us, since we'll be part of their family, as to how they best see the fit of the product amongst their products," he says. "Foglight may become more of a branding name rather than a corporate name; the product may become 'Foglight.' That's really Quest's decision and that's something that we'll be working out in the next 30 days."

Whether it turns out to be the name of the product or the division, Foglight's current staff will be remaining in the park.

"There will be no change in our facilities we'll still be based in Pleasanton," he adds. "If anything, we'll be expanding the space."

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