What is Quest Doing?

For a long time now I’ve been hearing that Quest was going to release a LiteSpeed for Oracle. Actually, to tell the whole truth, I’ve been hearing it since the Imceda days for those of you who can remember back that far. After the Oracle release, they were then to release DB2, MySQL, Sybase, etc. LiteSpeed was going to take over the entire backup market.

Now I hear that LiteSpeed for Oracle has been cancelled. There are lots of rumors going around as to why, and when you get down to it, it really doesn’t matter. I happen to know that a lot of their customers have been waiting for this for a long time. The pitch for almost 3yrs now has been that LiteSpeed was a full enterprise database backup solution because it was going to bring your entire enterprise together under one database backup umbrella. I’ve even preached that many times myself because I was being told from very high up that it was going to happen. It was actually exciting. Just think about it. No matter what your platform, you can manage all of your database backups from one single repository. You could get all of your reports in a single place, manage all your licenses in a single place, and even push out all your installs from a single place. But that’s not going to happen now.

It’s not like the product doesn’t exist. I’ve actually played with an early beta of LiteSpeed for Oracle. So it’s not like they couldn’t figure out how to do it.

One of the more substantial rumors I’ve heard is that Oracle is in the process of developing the same technology and Quest didn’t feel like competing with them. Hey, you know what… whatever. Even if Oracle did develop backup compression technology they still wouldn’t offer you the same thing LiteSpeed would have, and that’s unified backup management for all your platforms.

Frankly, I’ve seen Quest pump out some real crap and push it on us like we’re stupid. TOAD for SQL Server comes to mind. There’s also their Change Director for SQL Server… don’t even get me started on that one. Maybe I’ll talk about that one soon. And then the really good ideas like LiteSpeed for Oracle and Coefficient get tabled. Now, Coefficient is still out there, and you can still buy it, but to my knowledge it hasn’t gone through any significant revision since Quest bought Imceda.

So if any of their sales people contact you and give you the song and dance about LiteSpeed unifying your different DB backup platforms, tell them I said they’re full of it.

Basically we’re right back where we started though… without a way to take care of all of our DB platforms in one place. And what are we going to do, turn to Backup Exec or ArcServe? I DON’T THINK SO. I’d rather manage my backups by hand than get involved with either of those products.

Anyway, if you look at LiteSpeed for SQL Server sales as any kind of an estimate on what your LiteSpeed for Oracle sales would be, then Quest is making a BIG mistake. Imceda was the only player in the market for SQL Server backup compression and they mopped up. Even after Idera and Red-Gate came along, LiteSpeed still sold (and is still selling) like hotcakes. It just goes to show that there’s enough market to go around for everyone. But Quest wouldn’t have to share it with everyone. They’d have the entire market all to themselves. And even if Oracle did get in the game, Oracle has this way of making everything more difficult than it needs to be, so there’d still be a benefit to LiteSpeed. And again, there’s still that whole unified management thing it would bring you.

This is just a really good example of Quest not listening to their customers because I know for a fact that many of their customers have been begging for this. And how many people do you know who would tell you that they don’t want 85% compression on their backups and drastically reduced backup times? Nobody that I’ve ever seen.

So again, what is Quest doing?