IT Simplified - Quest's Executive Blog

Ever since I joined the workforce (which was longer ago than I care to admit!), the corporate mantra has always been the same: “We need to do more with less.”

The more, of course, refers to work, while the less, naturally, refers to money. Frankly, we’ve gotten to point where the need to do more with less pretty much goes without saying. I mean, seriously, when was the last time your boss came into a meeting and said, “Good news! Our budget was just dramatically increased and the company is not expecting nearly as much productivity from us this year!”

Fair or not, doing more with less has simply become an expected and accepted part of the job description for most workers, especially those who ply their trade in IT.

Now, scientists will tell you that there is no such thing as perpetual motion; that forward progress cannot go on indefinitely.  Unfortunately, chances are none of those scientists rank among the executive decision makers at your company. The fact is, when it comes to productivity in the corporate world, perpetual motion is expected, and in some cases, demanded.

So how do we do it? How do we constantly keep advancing levels of productivity, even in the face of decreased budgets? The answer, of course, is innovation. Finding bigger, better, faster, and perhaps most importantly, more cost-effective ways of doing things.

In the world of backup, the need to feed the ever-hungry monsters that are cost savings and performance efficiency led us to an innovation known as the “single pane of glass.”

And for a time, this new approach served its purpose, greatly improving work flow and reducing the effort involved in protecting and managing complex environments. Those vendors that were quick to embrace the single pane of glass concept reaped rewards in the form of new customers and increased market share. Some still tout the single pane of glass today as their major competitive differentiator.

But the need for constant innovation and advancement in the name of increased productivity and cost savings --- the need for perpetual motion --- can quickly turn yesterday’s marvelous innovation into today’s outdated approach. Eventually, innovations of the past run out of steam, and the need for perpetual motion once again becomes front and center.

Such is the case with the single pane of glass approach to backup and recovery. The once-static nature of IT infrastructure has given way to a level of fluidity most never have imagined. Virtualization and cloud have forever changed the data center. Mission-critical applications and databases have become exponentially more critical. And the need to protect IT services has replaced the need to protect IT infrastructure. In other words, IT has become a world that the single pane of glass was not designed to protect.

The problem with the single-pane approach is that, as its name suggests, it delivers a flat, single-dimensional view of data protection; a limited approach that supports just a single IT admin role and inherently focuses on infrastructure rather than services. In a world where infrastructure is fluid and assets are constantly moving between physical and virtual, and on-prem and off, the single pane can quickly become, pun intended, quite a pain, not only for the single admin asked to shoulder a tremendous workload, but for the business-line owners with no visibility into (or control over) whether or not their critical assets are protected.

At Quest, we believe the time to innovate has again come. It’s time to shatter the “single pain” approach to data protection, and instead enable specialized, role-based workflows that map specifically to the service or services a given admin is responsible for protecting. It’s time to enable business line owners to play a bigger role in the protection of their data and services.

Next month, we’ll be formally unveiling a new technology that does just that; one that shatters the single pane of glass, better enables IT to align backup and recovery with the changing needs of today’s business, and helps organizations meet the never-ending need to do more with less. Perpetual motion is, after all, perpetual.

Stay tuned!

My high school and university years, as well as a few years after that, included full-time work in the hotel industry. I did everything from carry luggage and wait tables in the restaurant, to run the overall operations when the big boss was away. Fun times!  When I helped build our first online reservation system, my love for the IT game began.  A couple decades later, I still spend plenty of time in hotels – but only as a guest. 

One thing that has really stuck with me from that time is a focus on exceptional customer service. It seems like a no brainer to say, “Taking care of your customers is important,” but walking the talk is often a lot harder when revenue, costs and other ‘business’ issues compete for focus. At Quest, we believe that by building great products and by taking care of both customers and employees, the revenues follow and the required investments become a lot more obvious. 

Our Toad family of products is an excellent example. Since the early days of Toad and still today as the industry leader, we’ve been able to build great products by listening to our customers and literally building what they ask for. In the case of our flagship product, Toad for Oracle, the development team has always incorporated user feedback in a rapid-delivery beta cycle. We still have a continuous beta program in place today, and deliver at least two updates per week. But, with the creation of a web portal called Toad Idea Pond, we took it a step further.

Toad Idea Pond is an online, interactive method of collecting user input that’s accessible through Toad World, our online community for education and collaboration. Any one of our 2 million Toad users can submit product ideas and best practices for using Toad, the community votes them up or down and the best ideas bubble to the surface. It’s been awesome to see the community interactivity around the ideas. More than 600 ideas have been submitted since we formed Idea Pond and 60 have been implemented in the two most recent releases. This week’s release of Toad for Oracle 11.5 also included new enhancements, like workspace management and code completion, that were suggested by users. 

The Toad user community, without question, has helped make the product the popular tool that it is today.  So, on behalf of Quest and Team Toad, thank you Toad Community! Please keep submitting your fantastic ideas on the Toad Idea Pond. Keep interacting with each other. Keep pushing your use of Toad to the limits. In return, you have our commitment to provide the excellent service Hotel Toad has come to be known for.