Quest Paves the Way to Win7 with Two Updates

"Quest is in the migration business -- a several hundred million-dollar migration business," says Shayne Higdon, senior VP and GM, User Workspace Management and Monitoring, Quest Software. Higdon should know, because he has his fingerprints all over Quest's business in this area, and therefore is a major player in its future.

Of top current concern for Higdon is Windows 7 -- which he says is running on 39 percent of PCs -- and the release of new versions of his company's Workspace ChangeBASE and Workspace Asset Manager products, which he lauds for their abilities to slash average migration times to Win 7 by up to 50 percent, which in the real world translates up to six months. Of course, Quest also notes that these two new solutions advance the software firm's required ability to manage user-centric workspaces that run on any device, anytime, anywhere.

When Workspace ChangeBASE and Workspace Asset Manager get together, they do a good thing, which is taking on the previously and largely ignored task of tracking down and cleaning up applications which might otherwise form an obstacle to Quest's several-hundred-million-dollar migration practice. Continuing in this positive vein, the two solutions then take over management of the ongoing application environment with dynamic updates based on application compatibility rule info in addition to monthly updates of OS patches.

Quest sums up these capabilities by declaring, "With these latest advancements, Quest integrates application compatibility with application discovery to create a complete user workspace management portfolio that alleviates Windows 7 deployment challenges." No muss, no fuss.

The company is basically saying that when it comes to Win 7 migrations, if you're not using Quest for everything from pre-deployment preparation to in-the-trenches support and ongoing maintenance and management, you must be crazy.

Windows 8 is also on Quest's migration radar, and for a solid blog's worth of information on that upcoming migration -- Higdon courteously reminds us that Win7 end of life is just around the corner in 2014 -- please go to our Virtual Snapshot column for "Are You Ready to Exploit Windows 8?"

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 06/06/2012 at 12:48 PM