Quest Software will acquire the Company from Francisco Partners. Patrick Nichols, current CEO of Quest, will continue to lead the Company supported by the existing executive management team. Upon closing of the transaction, Clearlake will become the majority shareholder in Quest. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
“We have long admired Quest as a leading identity-centric cybersecurity, data intelligence, and IT operations management software platform and the Company’s software solutions that help secure enterprise IT environments,” said Behdad Eghbali, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Clearlake. “We are excited to partner with Patrick and Carolyn McCarthy, Quest’s CFO, to utilize Clearlake’s O.P.S.® framework to help the Company strengthen its strategic growth plans including best practices to accelerate cloud/SaaS adoption and support its buy-and-build strategy.”
“IT teams worldwide rely on Quest to help them solve critical challenges that enable business growth and address crucial strategic initiatives. Quest has evolved to become a market leader in identity-centric cybersecurity, data intelligence, and IT operations management and I want to thank Francisco Partners for helping Quest realize this vision,” said Patrick Nichols, CEO of Quest. “Our new partnership with Clearlake will accelerate Quest’s momentum as a leader and innovator as we increase our investment pace in our core product roadmaps, cloud/SaaS offerings, and global presence. We will continue to expand our customer base as computing environments and related management, modernization, and security challenges, become more complex.”
“It has been a pleasure partnering with Patrick and the entire management team at Quest in scaling the business both organically and through strategic acquisitions,” said Brian Decker, Partner and Christine Wang, Principal at Francisco Partners. “Since our partnership with the Company, Quest has evolved to become an innovative leader in the cybersecurity, data intelligence and IT operations management markets delivering significant value to its customers and partners.”
The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022, pending customary regulatory approvals and closing conditions.
