Quest Software, Inc. today announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Surgient, Inc., a provider of private cloud automation software. The Austin, Texas-based company’s Surgient Platform enables organizations to deploy and manage secure cloud infrastructures to gain business agility and reduce costs. With the Surgient Automation Platform, organizations can create robust and secure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds that may be shared across the organization. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close during the third quarter of 2010.

“Quest has a proven track record of acquiring companies with exceptional technologies that eliminate barriers to entry for organizations,” said Doug Garn, CEO and president of Quest Software. “Since 2003, Surgient has developed an impressive array of patented technologies and products, developed by some of the brightest people in the industry. When the acquisition is complete, our customers will have the platform they need to not only quickly implement private cloud infrastructures, but also support them effectively with the best management solutions in the industry.”

Private cloud computing is emerging as a fundamental requirement for businesses. According to a recent IDC survey, 73 percent of all organizations are evaluating, planning or have already implemented private cloud strategies. As a leading provider of cloud automation solutions, Surgient provides a patented and proven technology that supports heterogeneous hypervisor environments and diverse customer environments including mid-market, enterprise and managed service providers. Surgient has more than 60 customers with 160 successful deployments.

“Demand for workload and server automation tools is growing rapidly and will top $1 billion by 2014,” said Mary Johnston Turner, IDC research director for Enterprise Systems Management. “Increased use of virtualization and plans for private cloud data centers are creating the need for dynamic workload migration and system provisioning solutions that can react to real time application and business service performance requirements. The combination of Quest’s Foglight, Vizioncore, and Surgient technologies will offer customers a number of key private cloud data center management building blocks.”

As the largest independent software vendor in virtualization management solutions, with more than 20,000 customers, Quest seeks to enrich its customers’ virtualization and cloud implementations with data protection, monitoring, administration, and desktop virtualization solutions to reduce administration costs, and make more efficient use of virtualized computing resources. The acquisition of cloud automation provider Surgient, will uniquely position Quest to deliver products and services that add value for customers by enabling rapid, affordable deployment of private clouds, thus allowing customers to fully leverage their investments in virtualization without the risk.