Quest Development Corporation was a privately held software development company founded by serial entrepreneur Kevin Azzouz at a newly developed technology center in

San Luis Obispo, California ; ; ; Chumashan languages, Chumash: ''tiłhini'') is a city and county seat of San Luis Obispo County, California, United States. Located on the Central Coast (California), Central Coast of California, San Luis Obispo is roughly halfway betwee ...

. Azzouz began developing a storage management and backup platform after his early purchase of a Rodime hard drive failed in 1983 resulting in the loss of important data. Upon completion of the first fully functional version of his platform, Azzouz licensed it to

Peter Norton Computing Peter Norton Computing, Inc., was a software company founded by Peter Norton. The first and best known software package it produced was Norton Utilities. Another successful software package was Norton Commander, especially the DOS version. The com ...

as The Norton Backup and then subsequently to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0. Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series run as a shell on top of MS-DOS; it was the last Windows 1 ...

and Windows NTBackup. Peter Norton Computing was acquired by Symantec in 1990. Quest retained exclusive ownership of all

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

it developed, while Symantec retained exclusive marketing rights over the software. To provide a backup solution for the

Norton Utilities Norton Utilities is a utility software suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a computer. The latest version of the original series of Norton Utilities is Norton Utilities 16 for Windows XP/Vista/7/8, released 26 Octob ...

for

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

suite, Quest acquired FastBack for Macintosh from Fifth Generation Systems, bringing its principal author, Tom Chappell, into Quest as part of the transaction. The relationship between Fifth Generation Systems and Quest was not always harmonious; it spawned litigation, with Quest prevailing after the discovery process led to dismissal by the court. In January 1993, Quest paid Symantec to terminate their partnership agreements. Azzouz terminated the Quest relationship with Symantec due to disagreements with

Gordon Eubanks Gordon Edwin Eubanks, Jr. (born November 7, 1946) is an American microcomputer industry pioneer who worked with Gary Kildall in the early days of Digital Research (DRI). Eubanks attended Oklahoma State University, where he was involved as a ...

, CEO at Symantec, over the best strategy for becoming the industry standard as growth of PC hard drives was explosively scaling. Quest completed the separation from Symantec then immediately licensed their product suite to several

tape drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic-tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability. ...

and

optical drive In computing, an optical disc drive (ODD) is a disk drive, disc drive that uses laser light or electromagnetic waves within or near the visible light spectrum as part of the process of reading or writing data to or from optical discs. Some driv ...

vendors, a step that generated substantial revenue. The proven revenue growth allowed Quest to seek venture capital enabling Azzouz to quickly secure a significant investment from

Conner Peripherals Conner Peripherals, Inc. (commonly referred to as Conner), was a company that manufactured hard drives for personal computers. Conner Peripherals was founded in 1985 by Seagate Technology co-founder and San Jose State University alumnus Finis Conn ...

, the largest hard drive and tape drive manufacturer. Quest used the exclusive agreement with Conner to provide storage management software for all Conner storage devices which created exponential revenue growth. As part of the Conner investment, Quest completed the acquisition of Conner's software division, and the expanded company was renamed Arcada Software with Conner Peripherals owning controlling interest. By 1995 Arcada's Backup Exec and full suite of storage management products became the global industry standard for both desktop and network server platforms like

Windows NT Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...

IBM OS/2 International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company ...

and

Novell Netware NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the Internetwork Packet Exchange, IPX network protocol. The f ...

. In 1996 Arcada Software was acquired by

Seagate Technology Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American Computer data storage, data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with ...

as part of their software company acquisition growth strategy with Kevin Azzouz named as President of Seagate Software. Upon completion of Arcada's transition as Seagate Software, Azzouz launched development of internet technologies which led to him to join his long time mentor and partner, Lennart Mengwall, in acquiring controlling interest in OneWave shortly after their IPO led by Goldman Sachs.

References

{{Use dmy dates, date=April 2020 Defunct software companies of the United States Companies based in San Luis Obispo County, California Defunct computer companies based in California Gen Digital acquisitions