[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, my name's Steven Phillips. I'm Director of Product Marketing. I'm joined by Michael Tweddle who is President and General Manager at Quest of Microsoft Platform Management. Michael, welcome.
Thank you Steven.
So Michael, tell me why the launch of Quest On Demand, our first SaaS solution, is so significant for Quest.
Great question. So we launched our first SaaS platform last year, middle of last year, called Quest On Demand, and it's an important milestone for our business because, when you look at our customer base, they're on a journey of transitioning to the cloud, and they're looking for management auditing and migration solutions that are delivered as a service, that will match the cloud platforms that they're adopting, which is specifically Office 365. So for us to follow what our customers are doing, we need to be able to offer solutions in the same way that they want to purchase.
You know Michael, from a marketing perspective, I've seen the pace of our development really accelerate with our R&D and engineering teams. I've seen silos within the organization broken down as we're working closer and closer together. You know, as we do that and we get closer to the customer to really build enhancements and features that they want, what are other areas you think should be a focus as we go into this SaaS space?
Well to be honest, I mean, the entire business needs to be focused on SaaS because it is very different than developing on-premise solutions. So when you look at the traditional products that we have, which are very important to our portfolio so we're going to continue to invest in them, but the development cycle is very different, right. So we take requirements. It may take us three months to build them, another three months to test them, and then we release it.
So in the SaaS world it's very different. So it's more of a continuous delivery mechanism and we don't build everything all at once and then release it. So it's definitely the attitude of let's build a skateboard and then let's transition that skateboard into a bicycle and then transition that bicycle into a motorcycle and transition that into a car. So it's a very iterative process when we do that, and it's not just the engineering teams that have to focus on it. It's everyone within the business.
So we take a lot of feedback from the pre-sales teams, from the sales team, directly from our customers because we want to be able to build things and rapidly release them and get that real-time feedback. So we want to make sure that we're building things that our customers really want and, from our continuous delivery standpoint, allows us to do that with these SaaS solutions, which is pretty cool.
So why do you think now is the right time for us to grow our SaaS presence? Well it is just the right time from a market perspective. So we are very dependent on what Microsoft does. So our portfolio's depending on enhancing what Microsoft delivers, and their whole business model is getting customers to the cloud and modernizing IT. So they want organizations to adapt Azure and really consume Azure consumption and actively using Office 365. So we are being not necessarily dragged into this, but we're really pushing and riding the coattails of what Microsoft is doing, and when you look at the industry in general, a lot of the companies that we compete with are growing, and they're specifically growing their subscription revenue. So it's a great time for us to join in.
You mentioned the Office 365 adoption and how Microsoft's really pushing that. You know, in March we're launching another module within Quest On Demand which is around tenant-to-tenant on-demand migration. Tell me a little bit about why did we go there. You made the analogy about the skateboard then building the bicycle. What really drove us to make that our next part of the release?
So we've been in the migration business for as long as I can remember, and traditionally we would do migrations from migrating customers from old versions of the Microsoft platform to new versions of the Microsoft platform. But in addition to that, there's a lot of mergers and acquisitions that happen, and traditionally it was two companies that have on-prem, you know, data centers and they need to consolidate those into one. But as companies adopt Microsoft Office 365 more and more, when we see these mergers and acquisitions and even divestitures, it's not necessarily taking these on-prem data centers and consolidating them or splitting them apart. There are companies that are already in Office 365 that have Office 365 tenants. So they need to consolidate those or split them apart. So it really, this whole migration to the cloud has introduced a lot of net new migration scenarios, which is why we built this solution to merge Microsoft Office 365 tenants together.
So Michael, in general, in your deep background, you know, what have you learned when it comes to a company launching a cloud SaaS product?
So what I've really learned is that building and supporting SaaS offerings are different than on-prem, and not a good different or bad different. They're just different and it gives us a much better opportunity to really connect with our customers. So we've actually had very successful customer advisory boards where they have given us very real feedback about how we would expect your solutions to be delivered in the cloud. So we've really taken that to heart and have built solutions that our customers have been asking for and not only is this, you know, from a SaaS perspective, but the other lessons learned by building these things is that you support your customers differently.
So you can actually move into more of a proactive support model versus a reactive. So customers don't have to call us
07:36