Good bye Quest!

You may have read that Francisco Partners and Elliott Management have entered into an agreement to  Acquire the Dell Software Group – largely composed of the Quest software company bought from Dell in 2012 .   I’ve worked at Quest since 1998, but alas I will not be participating in this next stage of the Quest journey.

Although the timing of the announcement was influenced by the logistics of this sale, it is actually a decision I came to some time ago, well before this latest saga commenced.  I’ve been though an amazing 18 year journey with Quest – I’ve seen IPO, attempted privatisation of Quest, purchase by Dell, transition of Dell to private company as well as having participated in many other major company events.  In that time I’ve been involved in building software products like Spotlight that have been wildly successful and had the honour of leading a team of hundreds of fantastic developers across the world.  It’s been a tremendous experience, but after spending almost one third of my life with Quest I feel that I’d like to work closer to home (in Melbourne), work more directly with technology and with smaller teams. 

The details of my next endeavours are somewhat works in progress, but I can tell you that I’ll be working closely with fellow Quest Alumni Mark Gurry at MGA.  

Quest has been by far the most important professional relationship of my life and I owe so much to the company and it’s founders.  I’ve made friends and established collegial relationships that will last the rest of my life.   I’m going to miss all my friends at Quest and always look back fondly on my time there.  That having been said, I’m incredibly excited to be changing gears and very happy that I’ll be spending less times as the guest of United airlines :-)