(November 15, 2002) - Quest Software recently aquired Sitraka to broaden Quest's portfolio of application management products. For more background on this acquisition, JDJ spoke with Greg Kiessling, co-founder, chairman and CEO, Sitraka; and Eyal Aronoff, CTO, Quest.

JDJ: Will the acquisition result in any downsizing?

Eyal Aronoff: There are no plans to reduce any employees or to close any offices in the country. We are looking to make investments in this area.

JDJ:Sitraka used to be known as KL Group, and KL Group and Sitraka have both been known for maintaining an extremely high level of contact with their clients. Are you planning to maintain the visibility and the aggressive marketing in the ad program?

Eyal: One of the main reasons we decided to buy Sitraka was because of the great relationship they have with their customers, and because we have been their customer.

JDJ: Do you anticipate that this acquisition is going to change the general product landscape for the markets that you're in?

Eyal: Our acquisition of Sitraka will highlight the fact that Java performance management is moving toward holistic application monitoring. We've seen this happening already with the database vendors. Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle have already realized that it is important to provide both the application server and the database.

JDJ: Do you know what responsibilities Greg (Kiessling) and Ed (Lycklama) will have once the Quest acquisition is complete?

Eyal: Quest is looking to expand our product line to provide the holistic view of the application, including the application servers and the database, particularly for diagnostics of production systems and response time breakdown. So, we are definitely going to look at the expertise of the people at Sitraka to play a big part in that project. If anything, we want to expand their responsibilities beyond Java and into the whole response time breakdown. Performance management and monitoring go hand in hand, so we are looking to the people of Sitraka to step up and take more responsibility in this area.

JDJ: Greg, it sounds like you'll have to put in more hours...

Greg Kiessling: Ed and I are both thrilled about this and we're both committed to make integration work, certainly, to get the products' roadmaps integrated and to continue to build the next-generation products that will really deliver on the promises of performance management diagnostics. Both of us are completely committed to that goal.

JDJ: Is this acquisition likely to result in any incompatibility issues between Quest and Sitraka products?

Greg: Our products are almost entirely not competitive, so they're very complementary product lines. Customers are just going to see the capability to get a single, broader solution from a single vendor, going forward.

JDJ: Was there any particular reason that the sale was advantageous to Sitraka at this time?

Greg: We weren't looking to be acquired, but the more we learned about Quest, and the moreQuest learned about us, I think we both realized how fantastic the decision was. It allows Sitraka to achieve our goals of being the world's leading vendor of J2EE performance assurance solutions more quickly. We're facing the challenge of filling out a large worldwide direct sales force, we're facing the challenge of integrating with a broader performance management solution beyond the J2EE app server element, we're facing the challenge of expanding our products into the database area where Quest is clearly the leader. So in addition to the tremendous synergy in cultures between the two companies, there are a lot of strategic reasons why this acquisition makes a ton of sense for our employees, our customers, and us.

JDJ: Where do you see Java going at this time, and how will this deal affect that direction?

Greg: It continues to amaze me the extent that Java, particularly J2EE, is continuing to roll out in greater numbers of applications and increasingly into production. Two years ago it was very difficult to find large J2EE applications in production. Now there's clearly a large pipeline of applications heading towards production, and the early apps already in production. What we hear from our customers over and over is the challenge of getting the large J2EE-based applications performing at the level they require them to get them into production. The industry as a whole has chosen J2EE architecture for large-scale applications. The challenges of actually delivering on that are huge, and that's exactly the space we've been targeting, with JProbe and now PerformaSure. I think it's a great market, a great opportunity, and one that shows no signs of decreasing. .NET is on the horizon, and is an alternative architecture we'll continue to look at.

Eyal: This transaction is sort of a milestone. Quest has always catered to the mainstream applications. More and more applications and the concerns of our customers revolve around J2EE structure. I think that the timing of this transaction, and what it actually means is, this is a great symbol of the move of the J2EE applications from people's workstations into the data center. It is very similar to the way that we think of the move of the Microsoft-based solutions into the data center. We think it is exactly the same kind of move, from the theoretical "Oh, it would be great to build an application in Java" to real-life implementation and production.

JDJ: Any other comments?

Greg: We'd like to assure our customers that we will continue to deliver and enhance and support all of the Sitraka product lines going forward.

Eyal: We realize that the place Sitraka has in the hearts of the Java developers, we identify with it because we have very similar positions in the Oracle market space, and we would just like to tell the users that we have incredible commitment to the space. We're going into this space full-force and we will be absolutely committed to maintain the good will of the customers and the success of the product line.